Puerto López and the Poor Man´s Galapagos

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Puerto López is a small coastal fishing town with a population of just 14,000 alongside a pleasant beach. Whilst not a beach destination for travellers, most head to Montañita in Ecuador or Mancora in Peru, Puerto López whilst lacking surf unlike its rivals, does have one thing that pushes it above its relative neighbours, Puerto López actually has plenty going on outside of it's beach, specifically in the shape of Parque Nacional Machalilla, the reason that we were in town.



Our first day in town was following our first night bus experience in Ecuador, something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. A war movie was put on for the first two hours and despite their only being a few gringos on the bus, the movie was put on in English, good for us, utterly confusing for the locals. About ten minutes from the end of the movie the conductor finally noticed and switched the language, which of course meant that absolutely no one on the bus had any idea was happened by the end. That was only a small pain in the ass.



For some reason the driver set the internal temperature of the bus ridiculously high, so high in fact that it sucked the air from the bus, and made not only us, but the locals sweat as well. Truly lousy sleeping conditions. On top of that, Ecuadorian buses are known for the large amount of bag theft that occurs on them, which means that it is fairly unsafe for you to have your bag below your feet, or above you. That leaves having your bag on your lap or hanging on the back of the chair in front of you. Either way, the seats on Ecuadorian buses recline as far back as every other bus in South America that I have been on, but the chairs are closer together meaning that not only are the legs of anyone who stands at a European height too long for the space, you have an uncomfortable day-pack weight squashing you as well.



Compounding the lousy situation on the bus and we sat at angles uncomfortably whilst sweating, was the music. For reasons unknown, once the multi-lingual film had ended, the driver turned on some loud and extremely generic pop Latino pop music which he left on throughout the night. Making this somehow even more irritating than I would've thought possible, was the sad fact that there was only about three tracks that were left on repeat which made every one of the huge number of times we awoke during the journey feel like some kind of cheap and sweaty version of Groundhog Day.



The one wonderful thing about Ecuadorian buses though, is the cost of any trip, which is approximately $1 per hour. At that price I could could with being squashed and uncomfortable, but it would be nice if the people driving and conducting the bus were a tiny bit more mentally aware, turning the volume of the music down, if not off and most certainly turning down the temperature. I can always sling clothes on if I'm cold, but I am fairly sure that people will get upset if I take my clothes off to cool down.



That is definitely enough about buses... back to Puerto López. I was still travelling with Lindsay and Julie, my English friends and we were joined by Lovely (can't remember her name, figure this replacement is less offensive) who had been on the bus as well. We walked to Hostel Itapoá, where we haggled the price of our accommodation down to $7 each including breakfast. We quickly settled into our two storey room which had three beds on the lower level and a double bed with a bathroom and a sea view upstairs, not bad at all! It was a good start to our time in Puerto López.



Lovely and I left the two girls to sleep whilst we went for a dip in the clear warm sea for a some time before returning, showering and leaving again to use the internet. I was left alone after a while whilst Lovely returned to sleep as well and I struggled against the crippling urge by walking in no particular direction around the town, eventually sitting on a rock to watching for a while, the fisherman hauling out their smelly catches whilst pelicans flew overhead, watching out for anything that might fall for a second to the sand. Eventually I had to give up as well though, the night bus had provided very little sleep to anyone and we all ended our day extremely early to recover for the following day.



It took a surprising amount of effort, but the following morning we managed to rent bicycles and left town towards the national park, Machalilla, the only protected coastal area in Ecuador. Due to that fact, the park is not only hugely important to Ecuador, but to all of South America - it is an example of what a large part of the coast between Central and South America looked like before being populated or cut down. We were excited at the possibility of seeing some of the numerous animals and birds that populate the national park, although we'd made a mistake that we were soon to learn. We'd arrived at the park at completely the wrong season, the deep DRY season.



The four of us entered the national park at the Los Frailes entrance on our bikes and shortly after I left the girls behind as I saw how good the footpath was for mountain biking. As I said, we happened upon the park during the dry season and whilst the title, national park, generally throws forward images of fertile greenery, the park was in fact the complete opposite. The trees stood without foliage, grey and dormant, whilst beneath them lay the dusty white earth which I biked over rapidly. I skidded to a stop after some time when I spotted a sign pointing to a mirador and I turned off to investigate. Lindsay and XXXX joined me shortly after at this point of supreme beauty. We stood atop a cliff that overlooked the sea, a small beach-side village and a beautiful island. I could've stayed for some time in this tranquil location, but Julie didn't join us and we began to wonder where she was. I left to cycle back to search for her, before deciding that she the logical explanation for her absence was not spotting the sign and carrying on alone so we left as well, cycling rapidly downhill of a loose and crazy bending trail until the fantastic Los Frailes beach opened up in front of us.



This stunning beach was completely unpopulated and it's pure white sand housed no footprints expect for those of the birds and from Julie, who was sitting on a rock waiting for us. In our secluded paradise I clambered over rocks, out into the sea to obtain a view of the full cove. Crabs dodged my feet as waves crashed against the rocks around me. I got both the view and the photos I wanted before I turned my attention to the birds on the cliff above me. An odd scattering of gulls, pelicans and vultures sat, flapping their wings on the numerous occasions I slipped on the wet rocks, scaring the birds. It gave me an idea and I shouted up, causing a few of the birds to take off, giving me another nice photo opportunity before I began my tricky walk back.



I returned to the beach where Lindsay and XXXX were collecting the most colourful and interesting shells and pieces of coral, calmly enjoying the tranquillity of the bay. We spent longer than I would have thought relaxing before finally picking up our bikes and heading back the same way out of the park and onwards to the town of Machalilla. Here we admired the smelly, difficult work of the fisherman, working and gutting their catches before taking lunch at a safe, un-smelly distance before heading back in the direction of Puerto López. It was strange, although the park was for all visual purposes, dead when we visited, the vastness of the bland and dull colours formed a truly beautiful image of desolation and loneliness that I couldn't shake for some time.



We reached the turn off to Agua Blanca, a small indigenous community that has opened itself up to tourism. XXXX and I decided to cycle t extra 5km to visit the community, whilst Lindsay and Julie decided to head back to town. The entry fee to the village is fairly steep in Ecuadorian terms at $5, but you theoretically should get plenty for your money - a guided tour of the village which includes a museum, a tour of some ruins, believed to be the former capital of the Manta people and the chance to take a dip in a sulphuric pool. For us though, somehow things went a little wrong, we'd paid but failed to pick up a guide and instead cycled through the village ourselves, finding a lookout tower that highlighted the tremendous difference in colour between the majority of the national park and the verdant area around the river which flows through the village. Our last act of the day, before returning to Puerto López was to visit the sulphuric pool. Here I took a dip and found myself a little disappointed that the water was cold, which seems to intensify the eggy odour rendering my dive into the water akin to diving head first into someone’s ass. Apologies for the image.



The next day we took a tour to Isla de la Plata, a strange decision in retrospect, because it turned out that whilst the collective decision was to go, individually no-one wanted to. There was a good reason for this; as we'd already witnessed in the vast dead appearance of the mainland national park, we were going vastly out of season. We had been told that there was a small chance of seeing humpback whales, dolphins, turtles and a sea lion, but I'll get that out of the way first, we saw none of those.



We spent an hour bouncing over waves before we arrived at a beach on the island where a large building lay in front of us. It seemed to take Ecuador a bit longer than it should have to turn the island into part of the national park. It had previously passed through numerous private ownerships, one of which had even built a hotel - the structure that lay in front of us and that is now the park headquarters. Other than that building and a runway that we never saw, the island is relatively untouched outside of the designated walking routes, in fact due to the creatures that populate the island and the close proximity you can reach to them, the island is often referred to as 'The Poor Man's Galapagos Islands. Whilst the Galapagos Islands have vastly more species of far more interesting animals, it does usually cost around $1000 to visit, whilst Isla de la Plata cost us $35 each - poor man's indeed. Anyway, we were on the island and began a hike across the island up to a viewpoint where we could admire the islands dry colours which were surrounded by a perfect deep blue sea. The scenery was such that it reminded me of Isla del Sol in Lake Titicaca, one of my favourite places in South America so far.



We left the viewpoint and rapidly found ourselves amongst the islands main birds. The Blue Footed Booby is the main attraction of the island to most and the name is half way to being accurate. Unfortunately, it's the first two words of the name that are true, unfortunately the island is not in fact populated by wandering boobs. None-the-less, the birds are very interesting to see and to watch. The birds nest on the ground, comically surrounded by a series of outwards shooting streaks of their dung - the smell of which keeps away snakes. Pure magic. The blue feet are unsurprisingly strange and interesting to see, though the theories to why they are blue are a little sketchy. I read somewhere that the birds were attracted to the blueness and therefore over time selective breeding has rendering them the deep colour that they are. Our guide had a different theory though and said that it was because of the type of fish they eat - he suggested the the Red Footed Boobie ate a different selection, giving them red feet. Either way, I'm not sure I care outside of the fact that I like their strange colours. The different genders of the birds gave the birds real character and ones that the males in our tour could use to mock the females. The male birds all made a pleasant low whistling sound and nothing else, whilst the females all made a sound resembling an angry demented duck. You can see where the mocking came in. All of the characteristics of these strange earth dwelling birds amused and intrigued me and I loved the pairs of parents who looked after their fluffy children as they argued and fought upon their childish white feet.



Other species of birds we saw on the island included Nazca Boobies, Red Footed Boobies and a couple of others whose names elude me now. When the guided walk came to an end we returned to the beach to go snorkelling, which mixed results. We all changing into swimming gear on the boat and jumped into the ocean around the side of the island. I dove underwater to check out the coral and despite the colours being a little dull, I was impressed at its quality, quantity and the sheer number of fish. When I resurfaced, something had changed despite the fact that I was only under the water for perhaps a minute at the absolute most. A lot of people had begun to head back to the boat quickly and various shouts rose over the water, which as it turns out, was populated by many small jellyfish, which had begun to give out small but painful stings. A few of us persisted in the water when most of the others had returned to the boat. We desperately wanted to see as much as possible underwater, perhaps to make up for the disappointment of the numerous animals we didn't have the luck to see, but before long we all gave up and we climbed aboard the boat for the rocky journey back to the mainland.



We spent one more day in Puerto López and were granted with a warm sun, a clear sky and a sunset. I spent the remainder of the evening playing 'fetch the rock' with the hostal's friendly Golden Retriever, who very sadly was infested with fleas and as has become a little typical to me, he didn't appear to be looked after very well by the hostel owner. You will see the photos of the happy dog in the blog and perhaps feel sorry for him, but thankfully two weeks later I met a backpacker in Quito who had stayed in the same hostel and seeing the dog in distress had actually brought soap to kill off the fleas and had washed the dog. I liked where we stayed, but in much of Europe, it was be inconceivable to leave not only a pet, but any animal in that condition.



Late into the evening our time was up and we headed to our night-bus to Ecuador's capital city, Quito, for some more adventures.



I don't normally end an entry with any form of summary, but I think it's appropriate here. Our time on the coast had not been what we were expecting to say the least. In November the national park is very much dormant and the coast often cloudy, leaving little room for sun and of course the combination of these elements meant that the wildlife we expected were not present either. Isla de la Plata specifically had disappointed many in our tour group, but me, I enjoyed all of it. I loved cycling through the beautiful and desolate Los Frailes section of the park, seeing the perfect beach and despite not seeing much of Isla de la Plata, the characters of the Boobs made up for it and the jellyfish problem was, in retrospect, pretty comical. It is definitely fair to say that if I was ever to return to this part of Ecuador's coast, I would return in a very different season, but regardless, I had a great time.

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