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

No Place Like Home

Sorry for the lack of posts lately… things have been rather hectic in our house hunting. It's sort of a goldilocksian search for a place that’s not too big, or too small, or too far away, or too dangerous… Our first choice was denied, so now we're back on the hunt.

Other than housing woes, things are great. During our one weekend when our housing request was pending and we didn’t have to look for places, we got to get out of Quito for the night. We stayed at this beautiful volcanic lake a couple hours outside of the city, and checked out a little village called San Antonio de Ibarra that is famous for woodworking. It was great to see some of the campo. While our embassy friends looked for furniture, Monique and I relived a bit of the Peace Corps days, sipping cheap warm beer on a concrete bench in front of a convenience store in the town’s central park.

The next morning we went to a very cool reserve that rescues large birds of prey from unpleasant situations around the Americas (usually crappy zoos or private residences that keep them as pets). They had several condors, which are pretty amazing, along with a bunch of hawks, eagles, owls, and falcons. While we were checking out this bald eagle, the head of the reserve came out with a cute little baby chick, which the eagle promptly swallowed whole before singing us a song.


School and work are going well. Monique has been able to travel a few times to meet with local mayors implementing USAID projects, and is so far enjoying her job. I’m learning lots about the new Ecuadorian Constitution, which is fascinating, and am putting my knowledge to use at our legal clinic. Last Saturday I got to give a Know Your Rights presentation to about 30 Colombian refugees, many of whom are being victimized through housing, employment and educational discrimination, because in a general view in Ecuador that Colombians are criminals. It’s very exciting and challenging work.

President Correa is also keeping us on our toes. He recently implemented a new system of taxes on almost all imported goods, as a means to stimulate the economy. Overnight the prices on tons of consumables went up about 40%. Sucks for us because Chilean wine and olive oil are too expensive; sucks for the rest of the country because cheap Chinese clothing and farm tools are no longer affordable. We’ll see if it spawns an uptick in consumption of Ecuadorian wine (which as far as I can tell is nonexistent). And there’s a rumor Correa's going to cancel Carnival celebrations, because Ecuador took too much time off for Christmas. Seems like a bold move a few months before an election, but we’ll see how things pan out. We've already got our tickets booked for the beach. For the moment he’s wildly popular in most of the country, but pretty much reviled by the middle and upper class Quiteños (especially all of my ruling-class offspring classmates).

Correa also caused some waves in the diplomatic circles by publicly ridiculing and banishing a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent when he cancelled a few hundred thousand dollars worth of aid to Ecuador (although the agent in question had left the country 3 weeks before he was banished). Seems like this was mostly sword waving, but it’s given me a new joke for the realtors: “How long do you expect to rent the apartment? … Until Correa deports us!" Ha ha ha.

And of course, the worst part about being in Ecuador this month (besides missing inauguration in DC) was not being in Pittsburgh for the Superbowl. We didn't take the camera out to the bar, but here was my preparation:

OK…off for more apartment searching. Keep in touch!

Abrazos,

Dan and Monique