Now THAT'S what I call a treehouse......

In the highlands of San Cristobal, we visited a huge, 300 year-old baobab tree (the only one on the Galapagos) with our friends Paul, Gaby and Danny and Emily.  The people there had built this amazing tree house complete with a little kitchen, a sitting room and a mezzanine twin bedroom, not to mention a 10 metre fireman’s pole if you wanted to get down more quickly than the use of the rickety bridge allowed. 

Then when you got back down to ground level, they had dug out a channel in the centre of the root system, and you went down a ladder to another little sitting room - say 8 x 6 feet -  complete with a little toilet.  (which Louis used - I hope it wasn't just for show!)  the downstairs room had something of an earthy smell to it, but apparently you could rent the place out and live there if you wish!

After this we took lunch at an authentic place to eat which turned out to be more expensive than we thought, and with chicken so tough I couldn’t even cut it with all my strength.  We wondered if it was just a very old bird, but it turns out that they did cockfighting so these were the muscly losers, goodness knows what the winners would have tasted like then!

Louis writes:

We were on our way back from the highlands in the back of the truck and decided to stop off at a chicken-fighting restaurant.  So we had our lunch there and I had meat and everyone else had chicken. The meat was nice and the chicken was absolutely terrible, it was so hard, and that was only the loser of the fight! Imagine what the winner tasted like! After that we went to a treehouse which was apparently the biggest tree in the neighbourhood.  When we got there, we went across the bridge to a "ladder case" (not a staircase) and went up and up and up and finally we got to the top.   

We saw why people bother to stay here, it even had a telephone, a toilet, a shower, a bar, and a top terrace and even a 10 metre pole!!!!!!!  It was "grande" which means "big".  We were all begging our Mums and Dads to let us go down, but they said no, luckily for Frankie, because he wasn't particularly positive he wanted to do it. 

When we got down, we heard Paul say there was an underground house, and you got there by the roots. It had a big bed and a toilet and a table.  The only negative for Frankie was that it smelt like earth.........

I can't believe we are actually in a TREE!!!!

Looking down the root inside the base of the tree

Wow, these roots are massive!