April 30, 2011 Peguche Falls Continued and Cotacachi

The Facilities at Peguche Falls

There were a few things I forgot to mention in yesterday's post. One was that the bathroom at Peguche Falls was a bargain – it was either fifteen cents or a quarter to use the facilities, but there was a young girl, maybe about 10 years old who was the attendant and she was quite generous with the toilet paper. There was no soap, but given a choice between more than 3 sheets of toilet paper and soap, which would you choose?

The restroom at Peguche Falls

Cotacachi

We went back to Cotacachi and had time to walk around the town some. We saw a pickup truck full of some kind of beans that they eat there. They said the name, but I didn't write it down and I certainly don't remember it. I was told it was kind of a fuzzy white bean that has a sweet flavor.

Beans sold from the back of a truck in Cotacachi

I bought some more tagua jewelry and we window shopped some more in town -- The leather works in Cotacachi were stunning. Such care obviously went into all of the craftsmanship -- not only of the leather, but of most anything we saw there. It was kind of like stepping back in time when people had pride for their work.

Tagua

Tagua seed

Gorgeous leather child's saddle in one of the leather shops

We returned to the hotel for a lovely dinner. For an appetizer, I had ceviche de camerones (shrimp ceviche) and for the main course I had the sea bass with rice and a salad. I just had coke, but some of the group had wine or beer and we toasted our driver and guides and new friends with whatever we were drinking.

We determined that we all had bad toilet karma and bad internet karma since we had trouble with both while we were there, but it was the rainy season and I'm sure that had something to do with the internet issues. Some of our group had more toilet issues than others – I just had periods of no water pressure coupled with periods of extreme water pressure. It was a good experience and since I'm not a delicate flower, I thought it just made the place all the more charming to have its cranky side. After all, the hotel is over 100 years old. It was a great experience. The only part I didn't like -- the COLD sheets when you crawled into bed at night. There were heaters in the rooms, but the sheets seemed to always be very, very cold when you crawled into them – they seemed almost wet, but eventually body heat would warm them. I didn't move much at night!

The weather was mostly nice while we were there. The average high temperature is in the mid 60s and lows are in the 50s. It may be lcose to the equator, but the altitude is high so it is cooler than you might expect. A jacket was almost always necessary, but definitely in the mornings and evenings. And although it rained some, it didn't rain during any of our excursions, so we were quite fortunate. It was such a lovely trip.