The Magic Roundabout

This weekend, Nora Skelly, Becka, Grace, and three other girls from our trip (Emily, Carla and Christina) and I went to a little hostal called The Magic Roundabout in a cloud forest in Las Palmas, about 3 and a half hours from Quito.
The couple who runs the hostal, Meg and Ali, are British expatriates. Ali decided that he was sick of England, so he and a friend packed up and moved to Ecuador because the living is cheap (though a month after moving Ecuador dollarized, so that isn´t as true now). They bought a parcel of land in the cloud forest and let it be, and built the hostal. A few years later, Meg wrote to Ali and asked if she could come and work for awhile. She and Ali fell in love, got married, and now Meg is 7 months pregnant with their first kid. Oh, and they are huge hippies - Meg is having a water birth, both have dreadlocks and Meg has an organic garden where she grows tomatoes, 7 kinds of lettuce (Which made the best salad I´ve eaten since my summer working with the CSA), sweet corn, peas, some other fruits, herbs, etc. They started growing tobacco plants for the purpose of making botique tobacco products (and because tobacco plants are good organic pesticides), but then Meg got pregnant so they ditched the tobacco products idea.
The food was organic and amazing (for the first time since arriving in Ecuador I felt like eating was a healthful activity) and there were hammocs (hamacas en español) where we sat and read that overlooked the forest and road, and I took a couple of hikes to see waterfalls on the property. We didn´t realize it before starting our first hike, but we may have risked life and limb to see these waterfalls. There were some pretty steep dropoffs on one side, and a couple of the hills we scrambled up required ropes for holding onto. And we had to wade up a river (they had us wear Wellies). Oh, and did I mention that it was raining? Still, the first hike was really nice.
Sunday, I went for one more to see the "big waterfall". Grace wanted to come but she slipped and bruised her hip the night before, and Becka tried to come but her asthma got to her, so it was just me, Ali, his two sweet dogs (Guinness and Winston) and a machete hiking up this really steep, muddy, jungle mountain. I fell a few times (and got a bruise on my knee from a boulder in the river), but came out alive. I´m not as sure if that waterfall was worth it, but I know that I would have regretted it if I didn´t go to see it. And when there isn´t much else to do that´s as good a reason as any, right?
We were sad to go that afternoon, but it was enough time to relax, rejuvenate a little, and adventure enough to feel like we had taken a worthwhile trip.
Oh! Mom and Dad - they had a poster up for the Secret Garden hostal in Quito Antiguo and said it was a pretty nice place.