Hacienda la Cienega, Ecuador

 It is hard to keep your cigar alight in the thin Andean air.  There are however few nicer places to smoke a fine Ecuadorian Louis V cigar than the courtyard garden of the Hacienda La Ciénega. 

The summit of Cotapaxi had been glowing pink in the setting sun but night had come and I now had a view of the Southern Cross low in the sky; I was a degree of so south of the Equator.  To the north, the Plough pointed to where the Pole Star lay hidden below the horizon.

I had walked out into the courtyard to smoke my cigar.  One of my Ecuadorian companions offered me a proper light after my cheap wax matches failed to do the trick.  The Hacienda has 300 years of history.  Descendants of the Marquis of Maenza have owned it since the 17th century.  The address alone of this ancient house is enough to excite the traveller; it is simply Kilometre 326 Pan American Highway.

I kept walking the garden, drawing strongly on the cigar to keep it going.  There is not a lot of oxygen at 3,000 metres.  I felt I was in good company.  The German explorer Alexander von Humbolt had stayed here.  The Frenchman Charles de la Condamine had been here during his expedition to measure a degree of latitude at the Equator.  Ecuador's first president, Gabriel Garcia Moreno had been a visitor.  I felt that these men would, like me, have walked these pathways, maybe enjoying a cigar.

There was nowhere to sit.  The door of the hacienda's chapel was open and the interior lit.  I wondered whether to sit in a pew, after all, they burn incense.  I thought better of it and continued my stroll.  As I did so, I reached that special moment in a holiday that I always enjoy.  I had been keeping a travel journal as always.  It had been mostly a list of where I had been and what I had done.  As I walked, I began to form these mundane thoughts into the travel pieces I was going to write.  I had found my travel-writing muse in a hacienda garden.