Hosteria Papagayo - Machachi, Ecuador

Comment by familyman5, usa

August 2009

Great history
We stayed here in July 2009. This is a great place to get the hacienda experience at a reasonable price. Its a really nice old compound. It's a ways out in the country, very quiet, and there are some nice walks around the nearby hills. There aren't stores or restaurants in the vicinity, you either pay $5 for a taxi to come fetch you and take you to Machachi, or you walk down to the Pana and flag a bus or camionetta for about $1 to get to town. The on-site restaurant was really excellent, though it was a bit of a splurge compared to most of the rest of the places we ate in Ecuador. I'd go four stars for the place based on the above, but the two rooms we were in, one had a very musty/moldy smell the other had just had the wood floors sealed with some really smelly oil-based product, and the volatile organics in the air were pretty bad. Maybe you'll be luckier; Im sure the oil will air over time. The mold comes with the old adobe. Also, the shared bath facility is quite tight. You can book tours here -- among many, they offer the usual Cotopaxi bike and hike tour for $35. It comes out of Quito and makes a stop for breakfast at papagayo. Not being too interested in biking on dirt roads, (we later saw a couple of arms in slings from these tours) we flagged a bus to the park entrance for a couple bucks, and hired a camionetta at the entrance for $15 to take us for the day up to the lake and to the refuge parking lot on Cotopaxi.