Living It Up at the Hotel Rio Lindo
A small hotel. A modest coffee farm. A remote village in the lush cloud forests north of Quito. This was the exact size and shape of my long-running escapist daydream. It was a dream we poked at, but ultimately passed on (for now), last month in Colombia.
Our host, Janet, was an American expat retiree from Washington State. When we first contacted her back in December, on the recommendation of Liuan’s college professor, she seemed hesitant. The dream, it turned out, was a nightmare of endless meals for a long-running guest and she was barely breaking even.
I’m trained as an engineer, and therefore a die-hard realist. Her negativity just made me want to visit even more. Better to swallow hard truths now than live with bad decisions later.
I responded with something like, “but we can help with all that!” and even offered to pay to offset our three hungry non-volunteering boys. We just wanted an honest take on her experience. Her next response was the most gracious volunteering gig we’ve ever been offered. Free room and board, FOR OUR FAMILY OF FIVE, in return for four hours of volunteering on the weekdays.
Better still, when we got there, we personally connected with Janet and her son, Kevin. Every day we had long, deep and entertaining conversations that have been a rarity on the road. But I guess that’s to be expected among people who share the exact same dreams.
Apparently, we caught Janet in an unusually harried moment when we first reached out. Life, it seems, is pretty good at Rio Lindo. Though like anywhere, it’s not without its minor dramas.
Our volunteering work was pleasant. At least half of our work time was spent picking coffee. It was harvest season. We wandered for hours in shaded plantations, choosing the deep red, sticky berries and leaving the unripe green ones for another day. At various points we watched and aided in the peeling, fermentation, washing, drying, hulling and roasting. Though I’ve gone on six coffee tours in my lifetime (a post about that is forthcoming), I finally felt I understood the process from start to finish.
If you want to see what the experience was like, check out our Instagram reel.
A Most Interesting Use For My Travel Baking Scale
Prior to volunteering at the farm, we spent a week in Mindo. It is a little tourist town with tons of activities: chocolate tours, cable cars, ziplining, butterfly reserves. Our favorite experience was the El Quetzal de Mindo Leyenda tour. We roasted cacao beans, ground them, and prepared the xocolatl drink, all set to live music. It was chocolate in its most ancient form.
Though Rio Lindo is only 36 miles away from Mindo as the bird flies, getting there took ten hours. That was partly because we had to return our rental car in Quito, and partly because the road out to Cuellaje (the village where Rio Lindo is located), is narrow, winding, and unpaved. The bus ride was slow going, but incredible all the same.
Sometime during that journey, Janet asked if our kids wanted to see a huge snake. Kevin is a reptile biologist. He had caught a glossy black rat snake just shy of eight feet in length. He was ready to let it go, but since our boys were enthusiastic about seeing it, he held off until our arrival.
Before releasing it, he took some standard measurements. Three of us held the snake’s body at different points to stretch it out along a measuring tape. It measured 92 inches (almost 8 feet).
Next, Kevin tried to weigh it. But the scale he initially used was for weighing baskets of coffee beans. It was too imprecise for this slender creature. He fetched their kitchen scale, but the batteries were dead.
Always happy to play the hero, I ran to my room, reached into my backpack and fished out my fold-up baking scale. The picture below tells the rest of the story.
Slow Camino’s Most Popular Article
Our blog is first and foremost a way to communicate with our friends and family back home and an outlet to enjoy the art of writing. While our ambition for it is modest, it’s still fun to see when something resonates with a wider audience.
For that reason, I would like to highlight an article written by Liuan. It is titled, When You’re the First Tourist in a Remote Chinese Village. It tells the story of our serendipitous overnight stay at a regular family’s house in Western China while on our honeymoon.
I started our blog a year before we left on our year-long South America adventure. This was one of the earliest articles, and it never faded away like most posts do.
In fact, as of this writing, if you Google “remote Chinese village,” Liuan’s post is the top search result after you scroll past the videos. It beats out articles by National Geographic, UNESCO and CNN. The first couple results in “images” are also ours.
Our Road Trip Through Ecuador
This Sunday, we picked up our rental car in Quito and began day one of our three week ride through Ecuador, hitting up the coast, mountain and jungle regions. We have nothing booked in advance and no set itinerary. It’s experimental. Stay tuned, this month should be interesting!
Latest Posts from Slow Camino
The month of May featured a diversity of writers. Check out Oliver’s post where he retells some of our funniest stories from Bolivia. Also, we had a guest post by a friend and coworker, David Edgren, who grew up in Ecuador and gave me a wealth of tips for our road trip.
Oh yeah, and I was (almost) the victim of an armed robbery.
Ridiculous Short Stories From a Farm in Bolivia
OLIVER - MAY 25, 2023
Oliver, our nine-year old boy, recounts in his own words some of his funniest experiences during our two-week permaculture farm stay in Bolivia.
One of My Top Travel Anxieties Happened. I Got Mugged.
MATT - MAY 21, 2023
A mugger cut me off on a solitary street in Cali, Colombia. This is the story of how I got away and what I could have done differently.
Quick Tips for Travel to Chile
LIUAN - MAY 18, 2023
An acquaintance going to Chile from the United States in a few months asked about general travel tips for this country. This is what I told her, plus a bit more.
Ten Months into our Family Gap Year, Homesickness Hits
LIUAN - MAY 11, 2023
We’ve been on the road for nearly a year and are starting to think about our return home. Here are some of the first things each family member wants to do when we cross the threshold and put our bags down.
Road Trip Around Ecuador: A Local Shares His Advice
DAVID EDGREN / MATT - MAY 4, 2023
An friend from work who grew up in Ecuador emailed me his tips for the perfect road trip. They were so good, I decided to share.