Atacames and Tonsupa

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After the whistlestop tour of South Ecuador I was back on the road on my own and I decided to head to the coast for some R&R as I hadn´t had a good long lazy beach session since Australia. I booked my ticket with Trans Esmeraldes ( USD 8 for a 6 hour bus journey) which left at 6.45am the next day. The plan was to head to Tonsupa first following a recommendation and maybe Atacames after depending on how everything was going. For Tonsupa the only hotel in the guide book was the Playa del Sol which had a good location on the beach and nice big cabins for USD 30. Tonsupa was once a small fishing village and its now built up into a pleasant resort. It was quite strange though as there were no other Gringos in sight and my Spanish was very basic at best!!. Luckily the owner of the Playa Del Sol Elizabeth spoke English and she made sure I was ok. Tonsupa is a very quite resort and after 5 days of doing nothing except sitting on the beach, speaking poor spanish and watching CSI New York on DVD I was ready to hit Atacames with my Spanish vocab of 50 words!!

Atacames is one of Ecuador´s top beach resorts and it has a long sandy beach, plenty of HR´s and these fab beach bars on the Malecon which serve Batidos (fruit smoothies the best of which is Coco Batidos), beverages and Banana splits!!!! The restuarants serve amazing seafood dishes. The Sunday was a big football day where all the locals crowd around TV´s in the beach bars and watch the games. It would have been rude not to join them!!. As with Tonsupa though no-one spoke English and there was only a scattering of Gringo looking people around. The beach was great though and very relaxing. After a few days I was really lucky to meet Mary Lou who speaks English very well and her Aunt and cousins who were on holiday from Quito (Atacames is very popular with Quito residents as its the nearest beach to them). They looked after me with tasty lunches and got me into a great apartment in the same block the Arco Iris as them which had fantastic views across the penisula.

The Museo Acuario Marino is worth a visit and has some spectacular sea animals on display. Also the shopping is pretty good and I managed to pick up some T-shirts, shot glasses and craft souvineers!! Saturday night is very lively with all the beach bars having parties which spill out onto the beach. Overall Atacames was great fun and I hope to go back and visit one day.

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