Hate the rooster, love the donkey

---

Have you missed us??

**Update** Remember awhile ago when we were in the town of Banos and went upthe Tungurahua volcano but were dissapointed because although we could hear it rumbling we couldn´t see the lava being ejected. Well, guess what...It erupted!! They´ve evacuated 2 500 people from the town and surrounding hamlets, newspapers here are filled with photos with red cross workers etc. Actually, no one´s been hurt but of course thousands of animals have died. We´re glad we weren´t in town then, especially because our spanish is so bad that evacuating us may have been difficult.***

It´s been a few days since we´ve written so we´ve lots to catch up on. Now, where were we...

Ah yes, I believe we last touched base in the sea side town of Canoa. I feel that I need to update you on the Sunburn I received while body boarding. We thought it was relatively minor...turns out it was a killer. My back is crazy red and has only just now moved from severly painful to severly itchy. I keep thinking I´ve learned my lesson and then proving myself wrong. Shelagh has started to peel from the burn she got from the roof of the train. We´re hot! We spent a great evening in Canoa drinking what were supposed to be margaritas but were really just bad juice with a lot of booze in it, and gin and tonics (the gin prevents malaria mom - I had to do it), and had one of our best dinners yet of roast chicken and fries from a kindly lady with a roadside stand/restaurant. We had enjoyed the day so much we decided to stay, until...

We woke the next morning to cloudy skys and decided to head out. We knew we had a long day of busses ahead of us, but we greatly underestimated the times and grossly overestimated our ability to get on the right bus. It´s not that we went to the wrong place, we just managed to take what in Canada one might call the ¨milk run¨and what in South America one might call the ¨chickens on the bus, donkeys on the street, picking up kids from school run¨. Probably the highlight was when we had to change busses in some town that definately is not on our map of Ecuador and we appeared to be in the middle of some festival. We caught the tail end of some traditional dancing and then witnessed a very strange, low-budget, bad drag performance that involved a guy in a cher wig lip-synching and pushing another guy around a lot. It seemed to be popular with the people. We finally arrived in Peurto Lopez 8 hours and 5 busses later and the long day had taken a bit of a toll. After a minor hissy fit that involved Heather throwing some of her clothes out of her backpack we headed to a fantastic little local outdoor italian restaurant.

We woke up the next morning (well truthfully Shelagh never went to sleep due to the noise in our hostel) optomistic about the day and wanting to like Puerto Lopez. There was hope after some good coffee (which is REMARKABLY hard to find here by the way) and a spanish talking parrot. ¨Hola....wolf whistle...Buenos Dias¨ Somehow it´s more funny and less creepy when an animal hits on you in a foreign language. On that note...Shelagh has a developed a bizarre obsession with the donkey we ran into on the street a few times. She only pet it once, but has talked about it ever since, wondering if she could just let it roam the streets of Killarney during the day to come home when she calls it in the evening. I´m not convinced that subaru makes a ¨donkey gate¨for the back of their wagons. We hoped a bus to the National Park and went for a hike for a few hours, but when we came back for dinner (to the same italian restaurant I´m ashamed to say) we both agreed that Puerto Lopez had not won our hearts and that we should head back inland. This was confirmed by the smell in our cabana style hostel (which was supposed to be a new and improved hostel from the one the night before) and the rooster that started up at 4:34 am and continued non stop until we got up at 6:30. To top it off, apparently the power randomly goes off in these sea side towns (it actually happened to us 2 out of 4 mornings) so we were unable to shower... oh well, probably helped to ensure no one sat beside us on buses the next day. Oh, Shelagh also wanted me to mention that we often saw pigs just wandering around town.

So, we started the long trek to the city of Cuenca. It actually went very well (maybe we´re getting smarter in bus terminals - or maybe it´s just luck)and once we got off the bus that sounded like it was going to drop it´s transmission every time the driver changed gears, and before we even got here we knew we´d made the right choice. We´re back in the mountains, and we drove through some amazing scenery to get here. We´ve realized that our spanish is truely atrocious and since we´re planning to spend a few days in one place we´re going to attempt some spanish lessons. We have our first lesson this afternoon and will decide based on it, if we want to do a few more afternoons of lessons. Cuenca is the third largest city in Ecuador and is beautiful. It´s got tons of beautiful of old colonial buildings and WAY more churches than I have ever seen in one city. It also has a lot of artisans etc.

Okay...it´s actually a day later and we are now waiting for our second spanish lesson. The first one was really good. We actually covered a lot of the stuff that both of us should already know, but it has really helped to solidify it for me and to give me some much needed confidence with the language. Shelagh as we all know is a very bright girl and very proud of her native land Scotland, however she seems to have some small but critical mental block that completely prevents her from being able to say Ëscocia¨which is spanish for Scotland. We´ve got another lesson today and tomorrow. Hopefully with that we´ll have enough to build on.

We went to an excellent Columbian restaurant last night (after another hissy fit - this one by Shelagh over some putting photos onto cd confusion in the Fuji store). It´s funny how every culture has some sort of ¨put various toppings onto some sort of starchy base¨food. My favorite part was the fried bananas with guacamole, cheese and salsa on them. Yummy yummy as our guide in the Galapagos would say! Unfortunately it was in the evening so we didn´t need any coffee because it smelled like the columbian place made good coffee.

We just came from an amazing lunch as well. Here you can often buy a set lunch that includes soup, some sort of rice and/or potatoe and chicken, juice and sometimes dessert. Today we had an excellent one with yummy dessert for the whopping price of $2.

Although this is a beautiful city and clearly many people have lots of money, there is also a lot of poverty. There are a lot of people begging on the streets and of course many of them are children. It´s hard to see, but how many kids to you give change to or buy ice cream for? Obviously this problem is not unique to Ecuador or South America, it´s just that in North America we´re so much better at hiding it and ignoring it.

Unfortunately Shelagh is still having trouble with the pics, so none yet. We´ll keep trying because we really do have some excellent galapagos ones.

---

Comments

[Rhonda]

Do they even grow bananas there?
I was glad to see that you've found one meal (chicken on the roadside) that didn't combine bananas and cheese- maybe I WILL visit someday! And apparently Heather is blind no more, but now red, itchy and peeling. Hey, me too (poison ivy)!!

[Richard]

The coffee in this establishment sucks!!!
Speaking of coffee, its everywhere in Portugal and its freshly made and very strong. North American coffee is terrible as a found out, when I made a pot yesterday afternoon, after our air canada flight back from Toronto. I'll have a double shot espresso, please!!!