A week in Canoa and our stolen camera

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Well, we left La Hesperia a week ago and took a dusty, rough 8-hour bus ride to a small surfing town called Canoa. The best way to describe a bus ride in Ecuador is chaos. From arriving in a dusty, hot and humid bus terminal in the bigger cities to the constant bumps, swerves and random music and movies that we experience along the journey. Going through Santo Domingo reminds me of a wild-west city where chaos reigns and it represents the transition into the coastal region of Ecuador. Our bus that went from Santo Domingo to Pedernales looked as though it might not make it as it rattled going over potholes and bumps in the road. Although the memories of the chaos and nervousness of riding down a mountainside on a muddy trail in pouring rain seem like yesterday, the views that these bus rides afforded us are equally engrained. There is something about the sights, smells and sounds of these bus rides that are an experience all on their own.

The area is very green and lush with lizards, cacti, orchids and many other plants and animals. It is the rainy season now on the coast and it is significantly different in the dry season where it is cloudy and brown for most of the time. Canoa is a sleepy little surf town on the Pacific coast that is garnering attention as a relaxing place where travellers come for a few days and stay for a few weeks. Bamboo is the primary building material and many hotels are primarily constructed of bamboo and other local woods.

We stayed at two hotels in Canoa, both quite nice with great views of the ocean and sunsets. The waves are huge and surfers are almost always out. We will be back to take lessons in the next few weeks. Everything is cheap on the coast. We lived in luxury on $20 per day each and spent our days getting sunburned and swimming all day. There are some great restaraunts here that are friendly and relaxed. Jenn has adopted all the street dogs and is giving them the love that they never get. She especially liked a little Jessie-sized brown dog that was always around one of the restaraunts we ate at. The temperature here never goes below 25 Celsius and all of the buildings are built with bamboo and thatch roofs. It was a great town to unwind in for the week. We decided we were going to stay the weekend and head to Lalo Loor on Monday. We will be going back to Canoa at some time so we will post pictures of the town when we go back.

However, on Saturday night our camera was stolen from our hotel room and we spent one more night in Canoa before deciding to go buy a new camera. My insurance is covering the cost of replacement. So for now, it is only the loss of the pictures. Most of our pictures were from La Hesperia and we are already working on getting copies of other people´s pictures that were there at the same time. So, the story about our camera hunt. We first went to a city called Bahia de Caraquez which is a more urban place. To get there, we took a bus on a bumpy road with frequent mudslides (also blocked by protests for most of the day) then a boat across a river estuary to Bahia. The only place we could get camera´s were only on order and we did not want to wait a couple of days there to get a camera. Bahia is a city that has been repeatedly hit by big earthquakes and have reinvented themselves as an eco-city. They have tricycleros (bike taxis) that take people around the city. It is a great way to see the city and enjoy the warm weather. There are a lot of eco-hotels and conservation practices. The city is also very clean relative to other parts of ecuador. We stayed the day in a very old colonial hotel overlooking the ocean. We had a balcony that was overlooking the street that the waves smashed into. It was a beautiful place but we decided that afternoon after not finding a camera to get a night bus into Quito. For $9 each, we got an 8-hour trip that was air conditioned. The ride was bumpy. I managed to get to sleep but Jenn had a tough time for the last few hours. She said at one time, she looked over at me sleeping and my head was jarring back and forth from the bumps. The bus also rises from sea-level to almost 10,000 feet so we get out of breath easier here and it is much cooler but it is a nice break from the heat of the coast. We met a chilean couple in Bahia that was in Canoa and a group of people from Winnipeg that were at La Hesperia with us was also heading back to Quito.

So, now I am sitting in a hostel in Quito on the computer catching up on internet and Jenn is trying to get some sleep. Hopefully we can get a camera this morning and post some pictures of Quito. We are going to head to a book exchange as well and stock up on new books and look for a few other things including a new camera (that we will be protecting all the time). Overall, as frustrating as the loss of the camera was, it was a lesson learned and we will be able to get most of our pictures back through other people. We are heading to the reserve on Wednesday after another 6 hour bus back to the coast. Hopefully, we will be able to post an update in a week or so with some pictures of the coast and the reserve.

Cheers for now,

Lee

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