Long bus trips and lazy beach towns

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Our next stop was Canoa, a verrrrrrry small beach town on the Pacific coast. It has all dirt roads, no street names, and it’s just a simple, laid-back surfing town. All the local kids surf and sell surfing lessons. It’s in a bay so the water is warm and safe and the waves are usually good. The beach is lined with bars and restaurants, a lot of which were closed because we were there mid-week. Cool place, but we didn’t get to experience it to its fullest. But first we had to get there…

The bus ride to the Pacific coast of Ecuador was easily the worst bus ride we had taken up to this point in our journey. We had to take the only bus leaving Chuglilan at 4 a.m. back to the slightly larger town of Zumbahua. We waited in the cold in the town square for about 20 minutes with a small group of others, locals and 2 other travelers, until the bus driver decided to show up and get the bus going. Although there are storage compartments under the bus, our driver’s assistant decided to tie our backpacks to the roof of the bus. We bumped along in the dark along the unpaved road, stopping every 80 yards or so to pick up more passengers who waited on the side of the road. We had grown accustomed to this, as there are no real bus stops in South America, with the exception of the terminal (or in this case, the town square). We had also gotten used to random, small farm animals being carried aboard buses. However, at one of these roadside pick-ups a man needed to bring aboard an adult sheep and a lamb. I wasn’t sure what was happening as I stared out the window at the 2 men chasing around the sheep, but when they caught the first one, they tied a rope around its middle area and hauled it up to the roof of the bus and tied it down with our backpacks. Then they did the same with the 2nd one. Being the animal lover that I am, I was slightly appalled at the thought of the two sheep tied down to the roof of the bus, bouncing around up there as we drove over pothole after pothole. But at the same time, my entire sense of culture shock has disappeared at this point and I understand that that is the only way the local people can move things from point A to point B. It’s not like they have Ford F150s that they can just toss their goods in, including livestock. So, on top of the bus they go!

Anyway, we made it to Zumbahua after about 2 hours. There we had to switch buses, supposedly to head to Quevedo and change to another bus. Another several hours on unpaved mountain roads and we arrived in what we thought was Quevedo. But it wasn’t. We accidentally got off the bus at La Mana, about 30 minutes outside Quevedo. We’re still not sure about what happened with that because the driver and his assistant knew we were going to Quevedo, but still let us get off at La Mana and then told us to take a taxi to Quevedo. Could have been another circumstance where the bus we got on was never scheduled to stop at our destination, but instead they brought us somewhere close and dropped us off. So, we walked 8 blocks to the La Mana bus terminal (which is a city severely lacking in natural beauty and obviously not used to tourists, as we got stared down by every person we passed) and hopped on the local bus to Quevedo. From Quevedo we took another bus to Portoviejo and were finally back on all paved roads and out of the mountains! From Portoviejo, we had to take yet another bus to Bahia de Caraquez because we had missed the last bus of the day to Canoa, our final desination. We didn’t arrive in Bahia, the city right across the bay from San Vincente, which borders Canoa, until after dark and had to walk to the pier and wait for a ferry to take us across to San Vincente. From there, we had to take a taxi to Canoa, about a 10 minute drive. It was about 8:30 p.m. when we finally arrived. So, 5 buses, 1 ferry, and 1 taxi, and 16.5 hours later, we were there!!!! Rough day!

That night a strange thing happened. As we were walking to a restaurant to get some dinner, I felt a really sharp pain just under my belly button. It felt like someone was stabbing me in the belly button. It felt a little better if I bent over or sat down really slowly and then stayed in a semi-reclined position. I thought maybe I had given myself a hernia from carrying around my backpack. At dinner, the pain subsided because I was sitting down. But the walk back to the hostel was unbearable. I kept needing to bend over and I could barely walk. We finally made it back, and all I wanted to do was shower after spending all day on Ecuador’s dirtiest buses, but I couldn’t stand up straight! It was so bizarre! After about 30 minutes the pain just faded away and it was like it never occurred. So, we hopped in the shower but after just a few minutes, the water started spurting out puffs of air and then it just stopped. The toilet didn’t flush, the sink wouldn’t turn on… there was no more water! Worst day ever!

The next day, there was still no water at the hostel so I spent the morning checking out other hostels in Canoa. I found one called Lalo & Beach that had some really lovely owners, Lalo and Adriana. So, I went back to our original hostel, Coco Loco, where Ryan was still in bed. It was now 11:30 a.m. and I checked to see if the water was working now… still no! When we checked out I told the guy running the place that we weren’t going to pay full price ($8 each) since we didn’t have water to shower, brush our teeth, and we couldn’t even flush the toilet, and he said he wouldn’t lower the cost. I told him there was no way we would pay more than $6 each, and he finally got pissed off and agreed. He was really rude about it. Just fyi for anyone else planning on staying at Coco Loco in Canoa.

Our first real day there was a drag. It was cool and rainy. Ryan watched the World Cup and took a nap all day, while I got caught up on the blog. That night played several rounds of pool at a bar and then we went to another bar where it was the DJ’s birthday. Someone brought him a big cake, which I helped him slice and hand out to all the patrons. It was a great way to get some extra pieces of cake for myself (it was really tasty cake!). At the bar, we ran into Ron, our neighbor at the hostel. Ron spent hours talking Ryan’s ear off about all the conspiracy theories that he knows US and the United Nations are involved in. I think he was even talking about aliens at one point. I can’t be sure, though, because I was busy eating cake. Anyway, Ron is in the process of moving out of the U.S. to get away from all the conspiracies. He’s looking into property in Ecuador right now. Eventually I feigned my belly button pain so that we could escape Ron’s blabbering.

The next day, we got up and went to breakfast at the local vegetarian restaurant, Babel. That was an interesting experience. We ordered “pancakes” (an order of 3) and omlettes, right off the menu. When we ordered the omlettes, the woman taking our order looked very disconcerted. I asked her if she knew what an omlette was and she said in Spanish, “Yes, it’s spaghetti.” I actually had to explain to our waitress what an omlette was. Then, when the food came out, the “pancake” was actually a crepe with bananas in it and there was only 1 instead of 3. So I explained to her that we were supposed to have 3 pancakes, and she made us two more big crepes. We ended up with so much food for like $9. That afternoon, we took a long nap, which is unfortunate because it was really sunny and hot that day and would have been the perfect day to take a surfing lesson. Instead, when we got up at 3:30 p.m., it was too late to surf because of the tide so we rented boogie boards and had a blast on them for about an hour. That night we had the best meal so far in Ecuador at a restaurant called Café Flor. We had a big salad, shrimp fajitas and burritos. Yum!

The next day we traveled down to Puerto Lopez on another slightly complex travel day.

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