Car knee vowel

This past weekend Monique and I thought we'd use one of our few mutual long weekends to see a bit of the country, so we took off for the coast to celebrate Carnival. Luckily we had bought plane tickets a few weeks earlier, because the week before the biggest festival of the year, in which most of the country heads for the coast, all of the roads out of Quito washed away in mudslides.


We were still a little late in the game making hotel reservations, so Monique reserved the first room that was open from our Lonely Planet...we decided to go to Puerto Lopez on the Manabi coast, a few hours south of the U.S. military base that Ecuador is in the process of closing down. The guide book described it as an idyllic laid back little fishing town with beautiful beaches and great seafood. We figured things would still be crazy for Carnival, but had no idea what we were in for.


When our extremely crowded bus pulled into P.L. the town reminded me of how I've always pictured Haiti in the summer--all of the town's dirt roads had transformed into gray mud pits from the weeks of rain. Barefoot children fought malarial mosquitoes and hookworms for a spot to play in the 6 inch pools of standing water. We got off the bus and hired a tuk-tuk to shuttle us the half mile to our hotel. The tuk-tuk zipped us through the town and down to the beach, which although crowded with fishing boats was indeed a pretty spot. Unfortunately, a drainage ditch filled with garbage, dead fish parts, and more frolicking little kids separated us from our hotel. No worries...the tuk-tuk drove right down onto the sand, waited for a wave to recede, and then hurried across the wake before the next wave could pull us out to sea.


For the Carnival celebration every restaurant in town had set up a little cabana on the beach to make cocktails and sandwiches, and no cabana was complete without a 6 foot speaker blaring reggaeton, bachata, or 80's American pop. If you didn't like the song played by your cabana of choice it was not a problem, because you could always hear 3 others playing at equal volume. The music seemed like fun until we got to our hotel, and discovered that there was a speaker aimed right at our room that would be blasting music from 8 a.m. until 4 a.m. every day. After a brief fight with the hotel operator we managed to get half our deposit back and look for new digs.


Once we got settled into a quieter hotel on a nicer part of the beach, things began to turn around. Although the beach at Puerto Lopez was really crowded and noisy for Carnival, we were only about 10 km from a protected nature reserve which included Los Frailes beach, a beautiful strip of white sand in a cove between two cliffs. Our trusty tuk-tuk driver would give us door to beach service across the muddy highway. We spent our days lounging at Los Frailes (both getting supremely sunburned), and our nights sipping fresh piña coladas and munching on wonderful fresh ceviche and fried fish.


In Ecuador Carnival is the one time when it's socially acceptable to douse a complete stranger with water, so we were constantly looking over our shoulders for kids with squirt guns, water balloons, or most often, buckets. It wasn't so bad being at the beach and having someone from the bed of a pickup truck suddenly soak you with warm soapy water, but I imagine it was considerably less fun in the mountains of Quito where it's only about 60 degrees and you are usually wearing jeans rather than a bathing suit.


We decided we definitely want to come back and check out the coast in a less crowded time. Once our car gets here we plan on returning and camping out in the national forest and checking out some of the long stretches of completely undeveloped coast that we passed on the bus ride.


That's all for now...enjoy the pics, if I managed to get the slideshow to work, and keep in touch!


-Dan & Monique