As soon as the cabin’s caretakers Maria and Oscar left, I delighted in the luxury of solitude, sliding open the huge floor-to-ceiling glass doors and plunging straight into the outdoor solar-heated pool surrounded by whimsical fountain grass, senita cacti, and incredible varieties of yucca.
High on life, I relaxed to a soundtrack of cicadas, distant barking dogs, the uptempo crow of cockerels, and that unmistakable buzz of tiny hummingbird wings. After making a bowl of guacamole in the high-shine marble kitchen, I perused the proffered books before settling on Tony Cohan’s On Mexican Time which happily provided the perfect companion for my two days at Casa Etérea.
Later, while out hiking the Airbnb’s surrounding scrubland, I came across hundreds upon hundreds of crickets and grasshoppers, some with chirps as loud as lawnmowers, some in shades of bold red, mustard yellow, and iridescent green. After following a dry riverbed for some time, the blazing sun started to dip behind nearby mountains so I returned to the casa in a euphoric mood to find it had magically turned to a tin can shade of silver.
With no restaurants or shops nearby (San Miguel Centro is about a 20-minute drive away), I spent the first blissful evening cooking in the well-stocked kitchen, drinking wine, and listening to the Spotify playlist curated by Prashant Ashoka, the Airbnb’s owner and designer. Thousands of stars appeared after dark and I slept with the drapes open, excited to see how the light would play on the nearby volcanic slopes at sunrise.
