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Published: August 18th 2011
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In Mancora, at last, after a combination of fairly uncomfortable local buses. It is a bit of a touristy hotspot but I think that was what we wanted after so much time in the mountains!!
We got ourselves a wee private room at one end of town which was grand. The place had laundry which we needed to do by this stage too. And it was a couple of minutes walk to the beach.
Mancora beach was lovely, water was warm and it seemed pretty popular. There wasn’t much sand to the beach, which seems a stupid thing to say but it was a bit small.
Surfing and kitesurfing seem pretty popular here, as well as a trip to local swamps to see crocodiles. I'm sure i will regret not doing this but I think we felt pretty lazy when we got to Mancora. It didn't help that we had a lot of drinking buddies too!
We did another surf lesson here and it seems Eoghan has improved dramatically and is now much better than me, standing up almost every time!. It didn’t help that I was told I was not regular, I was actually goofy (when I was in
Trujillo I put my right foot back but the man in Mancora told me, after pushing me over a few times without me really understanding what was going on, that my left foot is actually stronger and was told to switch). But excuses over, he is now better.
We wandered around the first night but found that the place was pretty quiet during the week. The only bar we found open was woohoo, which turned out to be the best bar anyways. We met an american guy called Brad who could do the most amazing card tricks. He was amazing. We had the bar staff tortured for flaming shots and met some very happy Swiss guys who had spent 7 weeks mountaineering and was a wee bit glad to relax for a bit.
That was probably the first time we met Franscisco, who is a complete legend. He is american, he served in Vietnam, speaks 8 languages or something, seems to be minted, we dont know how. He also said that if you are friends with Franscico no one will mess with you including the Pickpockets, I do not know what that guy does but he was pretty cool!
Eoghan's giant steak
in the best restaurant in the world Pretty good for a first night anyway. If you are ever in Mancora you will meet him, I'm sure of it (another irish guy who showed up at our hostel on the last day went for dinner and came back a few hours later telling us stories of francisco!).
Then we bumped into some Kiwis and Aussies that we had met in Ica randomly. We all decided to move to one of the nicer popular hostels together and all get a dorm and hopefully fill it so we wouldn’t have to share with any strangers.
We booked to go to the Kokopelli hostel the next day, the pool was gorgeous with a swim up bar and the rooms were pretty nice and comfy looking.
Our friend Fiona as well decided to leave the mountains early and come to the beach, a brilliant choice from her I feel!
We had a great time hanging out with them dudes. Mostly drinking and chatting. Two of them had been to Galapagos Islands, they were divers, and had the best time by the looks of it. But we had already decided we couldn’t afford them and were going to Ecuador to do
Isla de la Plata, the poor man’s galapagos. We might learn to dive and then go back to do them properly.
We also found the best restaurant in the whole world. It had the biggest steak anyone has ever seen. The tuna steak was also huge and so tasty. The prawns were delicious and huge (although the kiwis and Aussies thought the prawns were pretty small, I think we need to go there next as I am very much enjoying the prawns!) We literally went there every night, the woman knew how we liked our steak by the end!
We went to a full moon party at the point hostel, this had been promoted all week and was supposed to be amazing, but it turns out it is absolutely nothing like full moon parties are meant to be like. It was so boring we went back to woohoo! We then went out with the bar staff in woo hoo to another party which was a lot better and managed to bump into our kiwi friends anyway.
We stayed pretty late and walked home along the beach, it was quite pretty so early but we probably looked terrible! When
we got to our hostel it was breakfast time and I managed to get a big plate of eggs before heading to bed. We were checking out that day as me and eoghan had a bus booked that night to go to Ecuador. We couldn’t stay in Mancora any longer as we were running out of time before we had to be in Quito for the start of our flights home. It was quite sad leaving though as we had so many friends there, and Heather and Rachel were coming up the next day so we were missing them by a day! But in Ecuador we were gonna see turtles and whales and blue footed boobies so on we went!
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