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Published: June 14th 2010
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So I haven´t written any blogs for ages and I´m starting with the most recent as it´s what I can remember best and you´ll just have to read them out of order. I haven´t uploaded photos for ages either. I´ll get round to it at some point but I can´t guarantee it will be soon as I´m having a bit too much fun in Quito.
When I left Huaraz, I was planning on heading up to Máncora to catch some rays and try out surfing. I couldn´t go directly there so I decided to stop off in the quieter beach town of Huanchaco. I got there quite early and it was foggy and grim, just like in Lima. I had a couple of hours´snooze in Casa Suiza, - which I really couldn´t recommend because the staff are a bit crap and it wasn´t a very friendly place - and then I decided I had had quite enough of Peru and went into Trujillo to buy a ticket to Ecuador for that very evening. I spent the afternoon sitting on the beach watching some surfers and reading.
The bus (Ormeño) was expensive but comfortable and went all the way
over the border to the not-particularly-safe city of Guayaquil. I´ve heard some nasty stories about the border crossing so I´m glad I didn´t tackle it by myself. I´m pretty sure I got diddled when I changed some money though. I immediately liked Ecuador as it was not gloomy like coastal Peru - there was banana tree after banana tree, mountains and sun! I stayed one night in Guayacuil and I´m quite sure that one night is enough. I ate crab for supper and watched an extremely dramatic double bill of Grey´s Anatomy (brilliant!) with a girl from Bath. In the morning, I checked out the sights of Guayaquil: a park with some large iguanas and turtles in it, and the malecón, a walkway along the river. Yes, that´s it. So I bundled myself into a bus headed for Montañita on the coast. Actually, someone else did the bundling as I was obviously looking confused. He got a dollar for his trouble.
Montañita is very small and full of gringos. It´s a good place to go to take surfing lessons, but it´s not really great for sunbathing at this time of year as it´s generally quite overcast (but not gloomy).
I went out by myself in the evening to try to make some friends and I was partly successful. I met a nice Swedish girl called Emily and chatted to her over dinner. When she had to go and find her boyfriend, who was a teacher at the local language school, I headed off down Calle De Los Cocteles to see what I could find. It was a delicious caipirinha and a lechy Quiteño. After about 10 mins of conversation: "Eres una buena persona. Ven a mi hotel. Voy a pagar." ¿COMO??! So then I went back to my hostel, when a guy (a very short guy) who was working there tried to hit on me as well. This is Montañita.
Luckily for me, the next day I bumped into Sofie, who I´d also seen in Puerto Mádryn, La Paz and Lima. We went to a fashion show in a stupidly classy club that evening and drank fresh fruit cocktails on Cocktail Alley. Yummm. The next morning I had a surf lesson. It was kind of drizzly when my lesson started but the sea was warm. My teacher was quite good and wasn´t a lech, so that was something. I was pretty crap at the surfing though. I kept getting the rope tangled around my leg and didn´t much like the waves hitting me in the face on the way out. I did stand up a couple of times but fell off immediately. The board seemed too slippery! The teacher had waxed it up but had lost the comb he used to make the wax more grippy earlier on. All in all, I was concentrating too much to really enjoy the ride. I was chilling out afterwards in a hammock when I spied Michael, with whom I´d trekked in Huaraz, on the balcony of the hostel opposite. He, Sofie and I had a delicious fish supper (ginger, coconut and peanut sauce) and attended "Ladies´Night" at Hola Ola. Full of posers. Sofie got dancing with some Colombian so Michael and I did some stupid moves and then argued about the existence of God for hours over some giant rum and maracuya cocktails.
The following day Sofie and I got a bus back to Guayaquil and hung around the terminal for a while before getting our overnight bus to Quito. We arrived stupidly early - and in fact nearly didn´t get off in Quito because we were an hour or so early and I couldn´t see the sign saying "Bienvenidos a Quito" - and having had no sleep due to the RIDICULOUS music that was played on the bus all night long.
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Jess
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glad to hear the adventures are continuing x x