The Coast

It´s time to talk about the coast!

Kurt already mentioned that we took a long, hot, uncomfortable overnight bus from Baños to Canoa. I´ll just reiterate that- long, hot, uncomfortable, complete with a 2 a.m. police search of everyone on the bus. I don´t think we fully comprehend what we are in for yet- Ecuador is a small country and the bus rides we´ve taken so far are nothing compared to what we´ll have to do in Peru and the rest of the countries we plan on visiting. Also, bus drivers are maniacs. But I digress...

We arrived in beautiful Canoa at 6:00 a.m. and waited around our excellent hostel, Hotel Bambú, for about an hour and a half until someone arrived who could check us into a room. This hostel was basically a resort for backpackers. It was right on the beach, and they had a variety of rooms and prices, from campsites and dorms to private cabañas with balconies. It also had a very good restaurant and bar (with a great happy hour, perfectly timed to coincide with the sunset), they rented surfboards and boogie boards, there were hammocks aplenty, and a ping pong table. Canoa itself is a really small town, very quiet and tranquil. Most people there are either fishermen or surfers, I think.

So, as you might guess, we did a whole lot of nothing (but relax) during the four days we spent there. (Kurt did have a rather gruesome doctor´s visit in the nearby town of San Vincente to treat his anthrax infection. A lot of you have expressed concern about the anthrax, but I am happy to report that as of now it is almost completely healed.) We spent most of our time on the beautiful, clean, wide beach. Kurt went surfing one day (he caught like four waves! he looked really cool, I was impressed) and I rented a boogie board. We ate a lot of ceviche and drank a lot of tropical drinks.

But before we knew it, it was time to move on again. We headed south to Puerto Lopez, which is a larger town, with a lot more fisherman and which many tourists use as a base to explore the nearby Parque Nacional Machalilla, which is Ecuador´s only coastal national park. We stayed in a not-so-great hostel for our first two nights before moving to the Sol Inn, a great, cheap backpacker´s hostel.

We spent a day touring the Isla de la Plata (part of Machalilla national park), often referred to as the ¨poor man´s Galapagos¨ ( so named because you can see many of the same bird species there,
and it only costs $30 to get there instead of your life´s savings). And yeah, we saw some cool birds. My favorites were the blue-footed boobies who for some reason have almost no fear of humans. We took a nice long hike throughout the island before heading back to the boat for lunch and snorkeling (the ocean is warm here! hooray!) where we spotted some clown and parrot fish, and two giant sea turtles (from the boat). Since everyone likes pictures of boobies, here´s a few:

Blue-footed boobies

An Adolescent Nazca Booby

A boobie and its baby

The next day we headed to the mainland part of Machalilla- a beach and coastal area known as Los Frailes, with some new friends from the hostel. This area was really nice. It preserves a tropical dry forest ecosystem (since Ecuador apparently hasn´t had proper winter rains in the last 3 years, it was really, really dry). So we did a hike through the dry forest which led us past two smaller beaches to the pristine, nearly empty beach of Los Frailes.

Los Frailes

The food on the coast was really nice but also much more expensive. Obviously there is a lot of seafood. The ceviche is as good as we´d heard (this is raw seafood, usually fish, shrimp, octopus, clam, or mixed, cooked in lime juice and mixed with tomatoes and onions). It always came served with either patacones (green plantain fritters) or chifles (also fried plantains but much thinner, like potato chips). The other highlight was pescado encocado (fish cooked in coconut milk). Encebollados, or fish soups, are also popular but it was so hot I never wanted to try them.

The bus snacks (on most long distance busses there are lots of food vendors that come onto the bus at various stops along the way) improved a lot on the coast- we tried pan de yuca (bread made with yuca, and sometimes nuts or cheese), empanadas de queso (these are often covered with sugar- weird, but not bad), and slices of piña or watermelon. The pineapple on the coast was incredible. Just out of this world. Unfortunately I neglected to take any pictures of food whatsoever during this leg of the journey. But here´s a picture of some guys playing volleyball in Puerto Lopez:

Look at how high that net is (click to enlarge)!

After Puerto Lopez the plan was to go to Montañita, a surfing/ party town about an hour south. But of all the fellow travelers we met who had been there, nobody had anything good to say about it. So we decided instead to check out Cuenca, Loja, and Vilcabamba before heading into Peru (these are all cities and towns in the Southern highlands of Ecuador). So Cuenca is where we´re at now. We´re heading to Vilcabamba tomorrow and then, finally, on Monday... Peru!