Surfing. Or atleast trying very hard.

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Once I got to Guayaquil on the 25th we saw Molly off on her flight back to the UK and then Liam and me spent the night in Guayaquil before heading down the next day to Peru.

We decided to go down to a little beach town called Mancora, right near the Ecuadorian border across which we had an eventful but not problematic crossing. There were two irritating immigration checks, then a traffic jam consisting of loads of trucks carrying animal skins and finally two customs/random checks.

Apparently you are NOT ALLOWED to carry potatoes or citrus fruits from Ecuador into Peru. Luckily for us Liam and I hid all our ´tatoes in "special places", and fooled the customs guards. Liam also told them he was Italian just to throw them off our scent.

The next few days were spent lazing on the beach. I cant remember the last time I was able to wake up at 11AM for two days on the trot. Its either been the stupid wake-up bell on the Yolita, our boat at the Galapagos, at 7AM every day or I´ve had to catch buses, or wake up for something else or the other for the last month or so.

We rented surfboards on the first day at Mancora, and walked around the beach looking cool. Then we waded around in the water with the boards looking stupid. Then we had some beers and felt better about looking stupid, and laughed at the other surfers who looked stupid.

The second day we took a surf lesson from Jaime (pronounced Hay-me), the Jefe de eventos (Chief of Events) and Presidente of the Mancora Surfing Club, a nice dude. The lesson basically involved him pushing us out far enough to catch the waves, since its bloody hard work paddling out. He then turns you around and pushes you into the wave as its breaking so you are moving fast enough to stand up and surf. Bit lame I know, but as soon as I manage a good 2 month stint in a gym somewhere, I´ll make sure I paddle myself out! Was good fun, though the max time I managed to stand up was about 5 seconds.

Otherwise the last few days have been spent eating good food, drinking lots of beer and generally doing boy stuff. Not anything dodgy, but its nice just being able to chill out with another dude, the conversations generally get more funny and boys are a lot less fussy than girls about stuff like where you eat, where you sleep, what you do everyday blah blah blah. So yeah!

We also stayed at a place which was $1.50 a night each. Which obviously meant the toilet wasnt working so we resorted to peeing into a four litre waterbottle we had with us.

It was fun.

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