Adventures on the beach

Today I returned from a week on the beach! It was adventurous, as all of our trips usually end up being since we seem to find ourselves in some pretty sticky situations sometimes, but it was so great to relax by the sea for an entire week.

We started out in a quiet beach town called Puerto Lopez, a long 10 hours from Quito. Our ears were pounded the entire 10 hours by throbbing reggaetone music, but we managed to keep ourselves busy by either sleeping, talking to our neighbors, or teaching Ecuadorians how to do Sudoku. We arrived in Puerto Lopez at around 9pm and were actually met at the bus station by a guy from our hostel. Much to our surprise, rather than hopping into the normal, yellow taxi, we piled into this cart type thing pulled by a motorcycle--Puerto Lopez's very unique taxi service. For every curve in the road, we would hold tight to each other and grab our huge packs for fear somebody or something would go tumbling right off! Our motorcycle-taxi took us to a gorgeous hostel right on the beach, with grass-roofed, bamboo buildings, hammocks slung between trees, a beautiful, tropical courtyard, and a fabulous breakfast place included.

Puerto Lopez is a quiet coast town with two main roads, one following the beach and the other branching off to the center of town. The road along the beach is littered with bamboo stands selling cocktails and yummy milkshakes that are never big enough, and there are tents selling jewelry and dresses and seafood restaurants open to the humid air. Not many people travel to Puerto Lopez, who knows why because it's gorgeous, so we didn't have to beat the crowds or even share the beach with anyone really. Also, the coast is HOT. Humid, sticky, inescapable heat. Taking a cold shower at the end of a sweltering day on the beach, let me tell you, is the most refreshing thing in the entire world. We sometimes took two showers a day. Or three. And we noticed that on this trip to the coast (compared to our last trip to Manta), the sun was way stronger and the mosquitos were way more common. Even after loads of sunscreen, buckets of bug spray, and huge, draping mosquito nets at night, our skin still ended up looking way too similar to rough, red coral. Not good.

Our last day in Puerto Lopez, we went on a boat trip to what we thought was Isla de la Plata. They call this island "poor man's Galapagos" because it hosts many of the same varieties of wildlife but doesn't cost nearly as much. Turns out, the boat wasn't taking us to the isla at all, just around the islands close to the port in Puerto Lopez. It was a wonderful little journey, though. We took turns diving off the boat and going snorkeling or just swimming around. (Sadly, I still can't say I've been snorkeling, though, because my lack of contact lenses prevented me from seeing anything under the water. Someday, though.) We saw blue-footed boobies and tons of gawking pelicans, a taste of the wildlife on the isla. We even went fishing for our lunch! My friend Eva and I were horrible fisherwomen though.... the only thing we managed to catch was the ground. How sad. Then our awesome tour guide made fish ceviche for lunch. Ceviche is like a cold soap with lots of onions and peppers and sometimes tomatoes. We have it with shrimp all the time at home but this time it was with raw fish that we had caught and skinned (or watched our guide skin them anyway =) ) and then poured tons of lemon juice over them to "cook" the fish. Sooo delicious.

We decided to leave in the middle of the week for Montañita. The lack of people in Puerto Lopez was starting to get to some of our group members so we took the bus for an hour and a half south to the touristy town of Montañita. My awesome Ecuadorian guidebook (thanks Nana and Grandad!!) describes the town perfectly: "Crammed into the centre are straw-roofed, bamboo-walled hostels and pizzerias advertised by bright wooden signs, while tanned, chilled-out gringos lounge around in shorts and bikinis, and surfers stride up the streets with boards under arm." It has a very hippy-like feel to it, with lots of hemp bracelets, tattoos, little clothing, and dope. And chockfull of gringos. But overall, kinda a neat feel. We hopped off our bus and not even 5 minutes into our walk to our $9/night hostel, we were flagged down by another hostel with rooms for only $5/night. What luck! But, excuse my language, it was a pretty shit hostel, with lumpy mattresses, greasy sheets, a bathroom with a perpetually sandy floor, no toilet paper, and a ceiling open to the sky. (Neat feeling showering under the stars though!) However, it also had tons of very comfy hammocks and a cute kitten. And Nina the dog. It was the animals that made us stay, I think.

Then we hit the beach, and man oh man, the beach hit back. There is a very strong ripe tide that will suck you under in a second and waves that tumble you around and around like a washing machine. We had a few scary moments, and once, one of the surfer guys had to come rescue us! After that, we mostly stuck to the very shallow parts and let the surfers take the deeper waters. The rest of the week saw us sleeping for hours on the beach, eating extremely delicious (and expensive) food from our favorite cafe Hola Ola ("Hello Wave"--how clever), dancing around on the beach at night, and meeting all sorts of people from all over--Colombians, Peruvians, Kiwis, Irish, Israeli.... Pick a country and I bet you can find someone in Montan*ita from there.

That weekend, people began pouring into the town as fast as money was pouring out of our poor wallets, which is to say, extremely fast. The weekends there always fill up since there are music concerts, I believe, almost every weekend. But we found ourselves, by the weekend, with only around $15 each or so. Bad news. And unfortunately, it just got worse from there. We decided it would be good to book a bus ticket home before the hordes of people started doing the same thing, but alas, we were too late and all of the buses were full. So. Long story short, we took a bus at 5:30am Sunday morning to Santa Elena, a town further south on the coast with more buses, and from there took a 3 hour, wonderfully air-conditioned bus (air-conditioning in Ecuador??) to Guayaquil, the largest city in Ecuador. We bought tickets for a bus to Quito, missed that very bus when we got lost in the massive bus terminal (who knew there were buses on the third floor?!), and ended up stuck penniless in Guayaquil. See, we had had only enough money for the one ticket for each of us, so then we tried to just wait around for the next bus to Quito. After hopping on that bus, we were promptly kicked off because we had taken other people's seats. Whoops. Then we tried exchanging the tickets. Wouldn't happen. So. Picture if you can three very tired young people flopped on the floor of a bus station, one sprawled fast asleep on the dirty ground, the other two with heads flopping from exhaustion (no sleep the night before!) and gnawing on a loaf of stale French bread with barely $3 between them. That's how bad it was. My friend Eva called the bread our "Aladdin bread" because we felt like poor Aladdin on the street or something. Looking back, it was all pretty humorous. But it wouldn't have been if we hadn't been rescued by our friend from Guayaquil. She lent us some money, fed us some sandwiches, let us sleep in her bed for a few hours, took us on a mini tour of Guayaquil, and then took us back to catch our bus to Quito. So in the end, we had been traveling or in the process of traveling from 5:30am on Sunday to 10:30am Monday. 29 hours if I did the math correctly. It's always an adventure here in Ecuador! And now it's back to work!