Imagine how your lungs would feel as they are doing this work at elevations above 10,000 ft ASL.

@Surfpirate That's why there are coca leaves to chew

@Spinliesel Although I saw a lot more Coca use in Peru than in Ecuador, they certainly saved the day for us when we flew into Cusco from Lima which is a greater than 11,000' elevation change. Debilitating headaches and nausea which took us two days to recover from but would have been much worse without the Coca leaves to chew on.

It's a video of 4 men with long curved shovels digging simultaneously into the soil and an older woman pulling the strip of dirt back which crumbles into plantable soil. I did look online for a similar video but couldn't find anything. It's an Inca style of planting, probably potatoes.

@Surfpirate thanks!

Sorry but I got this from a friend who still lives in Ecuador off her FB page.

@Surfpirate if fbuk connects to youtube and it not just a video uploaded the url will be in fbuk. Thanks anyway. In trying to trace it on youtube it took me to a lot of previously unseen by me Victor Jara videos.

2 years

@Surfpirate did you like it?

@btroje I liked it in many ways, delicious wholesome food, clean air and water, friendly people, affordable living but there were also issues such as political instability, corruption, petty crime, etc. We lived in Quito, Cuenca and Vilcabamba but toured the whole country which isn't that large compared to Canada. We spent 5 years traveling and living in different parts of the Americas and even found time to visit Antarctica, we traveled over 140k miles during that time.

@Surfpirate I have seen Cuenca mentioned elsewhere as a nice place to live

@btroje Cuenca is a nice city, we had a nice apartment downtown but eventually moved to a house because of the noise and air pollution, it's around 8,000' ASL so you want the air as fresh as possible. There is a large expat community in Cuenca in part because of the hype it has received over the years from International Living Magazine as the city of Eternal Spring but think of a cool and wet, early spring not a warm, sunny late spring. We eventually moved lower to Vilcabamba as my wife had a hard time acclimatizing to the thin air and it was nice to find a younger expat community as Cuenca is largely retirees.