La Finca Daysi

This Sunday my host mom took Mariana, Sammy and I to her cousin’s farm, Finca Daysi. Before we left for the farm, I had school work to do at La Loberia beach. We are working on mapping the populations of sea lions and marine iguanas on San Cristobal Island.

On my walk there, the street was covered with these bright green caterpillars with large orange spikes on their tail ends.

The waves at the beach were HUGE and it was a beautiful morning to walk along the coast.

After the beach we ate a delicious lunch at home and it was time for the farm! We weaved through the back roads of the highlands and ended up at a beautiful farm with a view of the ocean.

Finca Daysi grows coffee and has oranges, sugar cane and animals. We were given some coffee to drink and it was the best I have had in Ecuador! Our host mom has some and we make it occasionally at home. It is so good!

While sipping our drinks we played Cuarenta, an Ecuadorian card game. Sammy and I had learned in on our trip to the coast, but it seems like it is a little different each time.

It was then time to play with the animals. They had a 4 week old puppy named Tequila that was so loving and squirmy it was impossible not to love her. This is Mariana and I in the hammock with her when she first climbed up to us!

They also had piglets that were only a few months old as well. They didn’t have a mother but had been kept alive on cows milk. I never knew that was possible!

They also had this horse, who posed nicely for this picture.

In the back near the pigs I heard a bunch of little chirping sounds and asked to see inside this little shack. The baby chicks here are so cute and are all over the streets. These chicks were a little older than some but still made the sweet chirping sounds. I told the farmer that my sister loves chicks and Mariana told him that I want to own a farm. He told me he had one for sale if I wanted, or that we could live with them!

We had come to the farm to pick oranges, so we set off through the brush with the farm worker to the orange trees. Carlito climbed the tree and threw the oranges down for us to catch. At first he wasn’t too keen on taking us to pick oranges, but I think he even had fun watching us struggle to catch them as they fell from the tree.

Here is Mariana trying to catch an orange. If you look closely, the orange is falling underneath the bag.

We picked so many oranges that we will have them for weeks. Look at them all near Sammy’s feet!

We are down to less than a month left of this program! Only three weekends left! Where has the time gone?