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Published: October 12th 2006
Boobies, etc.
This past weekend was a long one in Ecuador, also… not for Columbus, but for Guayaquil’s independence day (Monday). A new friend from Spanish school, Roxane, and I took a 10-hour bus ride southwest to Manabi province on the coast. It was great to see a sizeable part of the country outside of the windows… although unfortunately, the pictures I tried to take from the bus are crappy. The scenery really is striking, mountains everywhere and in some places, covered by clouds. Outside of the cities, it truly felt like the middle of nowhere, with some places designated by kilometer markers on the road rather than by town names. Many of the people are really poor. With the elections coming up, it seemed that not a house or telephone pole didn’t have at least one sign for one candidate or another.
After spending Friday night in Manta, a sort of gaudy (at least by night) resort town, we headed to Puerto Lopez, a really cute fishing port. The “taxis” look like giant tricycles (I think there are a couple of photos), and there are two paved roads, one in the center of town and one in
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Dale Correa, the anti_Bush...front of the ocean (and as it’s a tiny town, these two roads are quite close to one another). We stayed at a small hotel owned by a New Yorker named Armando, who lived in South Boston for a couple of years. He was very helpful and has a strange philosophy of charging foreigners less than Ecuadorans, as a sort of revenge for having been charged more himself when he was traveling in Ecuador. That afternoon Roxane and I headed to Agua Blanca, one of the three parts of Machalilla National Park (the park is quite big - around 140,000 acres - and comprises Agua Blanca, an indigenous village and archaeological site; a beach and Isla de la Plata, or “poor man’s Galapagos”).
Agua Blanca is at the end of a 3-mile road the starts just outside of Puerto Lopez. Roxane and I figured we were near the end of it when we were turned back by a pack of passive but disgruntled-looking mini-bulls. Luckily, though, an SUV carrying a family from Guayaquil stopped and took us to the village. The people who live there are descendants of the Manteno, who lived around the same time as the Incas.
A guide took us around the village, showing us things like the sites where their ancestors are buried, while the mother from the family grilled him on the authenticity of everything. We came to a sulfur lake which is supposed to have medicinal properties; a few of us went in and got facials with clay from the bottom of the lake (in the photos).
The next morning, Roxane and I (and the family from Guayaquil, it turned out) took a boat from Puerto Lopez to the poor man’s Galapagos, so named because you can find some of the same birds there (but no giant tortoises or iguanas), for far less money. The birds really were impressive - blue-footed boobies (with their babies), albatrosses and frigates, the males of which have giant, bright red throats when they are pregnant. (I might be off on this. The tour was in Spanish.) As it is the dry season, the plants and trees looked completely dead, although our guide assured us that they were only sleeping until December, when the rainy season starts. After leaving the island, we went snorkeling and saw some very brightly colored fish (the only name I remember is
“bandeira”).
On Monday we headed to our last destination, Montanita, about an hour down the road from Puerto Lopez. It’s sort of a surf resort (apparently there are one or two international competitions there every year) and bungalow village packed into a little Ecuadoran town. The beach was pristine and very pretty during low tide, and at high tide, all the surfers came out. As the skies were overcast, though, we spent most of the time walking around town and looking at jewelry. At the end of the afternoon we headed back to Puerto Lopez to have dinner and catch the night bus back to Quito…
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Niklas
non-member comment
Great pictures! It looks like the leader of the mini-bulls is about to tip over.