This past week was (mostly) fantastic. We got new chicks; had water issues (not so fantastic); had loads of araza; hosted our first booking.com guests; and celebrated Lucia’s birthday.

**Look at these faces! There are 21 in total and they are doing wonderfully so far.**

We’re technically in the rainy season, but it’s incredibly dry. Lucía and I have been here about a month, and it hasn’t rained once. This is very unusual for these parts, especially during this season. We share our water source with two neighbors, and we’ve had a few days in which we’ve run out of water completely. We moved some tanks around, and set this one up at the bottom of our creek so it can pool more water. We then pump it up to the house.

Araza is in season…

We have a few trees around Nido de Vida.

They’re very sour and their outer layer is similar to a peach. It’s mostly used here for smoothies; the milk and some sugar really cut down the acidity.

Since we had so many, I wanted to experiment and try to make something different. I chose jam.

I didn’t have to add in any pectin (the natural substance that makes jam firm) since fruits typically have some degree of it already. Turns out that the more acid a fruit contains the more pectin it does too. In araza’s case, it must have a lot because it didn’t take much for the jam to get very firm. Actually, I’d say that the next time I make it, I’d like to make it slightly more runny. Despite macerating the fruit overnight and adding quite a lot of sugar, it turned out to be a sour jam. Next time, I’ll remove the skin and see if that makes a difference.

On Thursday, we got a booking.com reservation request for our cabin, La Dolly. We were surprised because the reservation was for the next day. It was a fast turnaround, but we were elated to finally have our first guests. They stayed with us for one night and were fantastic people. They came in from Quito, so I met them at our closest town, La Orense, and they followed me to Nido de Vida. That afternoon we hiked and went to the river. They relaxed for the rest of the evening, and the following morning we surprised them with tamales and an araza smoothie. They left midmorning as they were headed in search of a waterfall.

Last week in review.