So back to the fun stuff. First, I would like to thank Uncle Joe and Aunt Susan for paying for Leslie's and my weekend at the beach. When Joe gave me my graduation gift, I told him it would be enough for Leslie and me to spend a weekend at the beach in Ecuador and that that was what I'd do with it. So thank you very much for last weekend in Playas. I hope my description of the weekend is enough to let you enjoy last weekend with us. We left Sunday morning, having to go through Guayaquil to get to our eventual beach town, Playas Villamil. We decided to take a van from a private tourism company into Guayaquil, because for $12 each (instead of $8.50 per person on a public bus) our ride would be faster, more comfortable and more scenic. We didn't realize nearly how much faster, more comfortable or more scenic it would be until we had to take a public bus from Guayaquil to Playas. We lucked out as well, because we ended up getting the van to ourselves and the driver was a great guy named César from Machala who loved explaining to us all of the different agricultural plants we were seeing and where all the best views of the mountains are from the road. The road itself was built over the old Incan trail from Cuenca to the coast in the '80s. The Incas preferred to live in up in the mountains but they needed to go to the coast for commerce, so they cut themselves a trail through the mountains that would be both fast and simple for them. From the Cuenca side, the trail starts by cutting and winding through Cajas, the National Park and arguably the most beautiful place in the Andes. I'm sorry I don't have any pictures of the mountains here, but you can see them in the post about our camping trip in Cajas.
After going through Cajas we passed a place we had heard about, a restaurant called "El Mirador de Los Andes" that is apparently (it was apparent just from seeing them from the van) the best place to stop and drink mate de coca and take in the view. It's located at an incredible spot, from which you can see both the blankets of clouds below and above you and also several unfolding green mountain ranges. We didn't stop, but I plan to take my parents there when they first get to Ecuador.
After crossing through the lower blanket of clouds, which seems way more dangerous than it really is the first time you do it, all of a sudden we saw flat earth. By that, I mean a place where the earth was flat. Even flatter than Ohio there were mountains and the there was flat not even hills just straight flat. We had to pass through several kilometers of heavy vegetation before we saw anything humanized: which were small highway towns and the agricultural fields surrounding them. We saw banana fields, cacao fields (cacao is the plant, cocoa is the fruit, chocolate is the product), sugar cane fields and fields for other plants I can't remember off the top of my head. I remember the banana fields because you could see the huge stalks with bunches and bunches of bananas hanging from the trees. I remember the cacao fields because come on it's chocolate of course I remember the cacao fields. And I remember the sugar cane fields because César explained to me that it takes almost three months to completely grow a crop of sugar cane and you can do it four times a year. No wonder sugar cane is the plant they make their liquor from.
This is a picture taken of a cacao field from the van. If you can see them, admittedly they're really blurred, there are purple shoe-size pods hanging from some branches. That's where the cocoa is.
In the little towns we passed through (Ecuador's version of one-stoplight towns) there were tons of little set-ups where people were selling their fruits, and veggies, freshly picked from their fields and gardens that morning. We didn't stop, so I can't attest from personal experience to how cheap it all is, but Angel once brought home a bunch of oritos (about 50, check Strange New Fruits) that he said he'd bought for a dollar at one of these places. The following picture, also taken from the van and unfortunately blurred, is of one of these set-ups.
Needless to say, the ride into Guayaquil was incredible and beautiful. The van company's Guayaquil office was just a couple blocks from the "terminal terrestre,"
so we walked downto pick up a bus to Playas. The whole place was packed. And when I say packed, I mean packed in a way you can only experience in "developing" countries. These people almost never believe in lines, they just believe in big bunches. And it definitely didn't help that we had a suitcase with us that either had to be rolled or carried; we decided that the next time we have to take public buses here we can only take with us what fits in our backpacks. So if I want to take a jug of water or if Leslie wants to take a purse they have to go in the backpacks too. We finally got our tickets bought, and finally got to the place where our bus would show up, and there was a mob of people waiting to get on the buses. What happens is, as soon as the bus shows up (it's already empty praise the Lord, and I'm serious about praising the Lord people would be crushed if the mobs were trying to get both on and off the bus at the same time) a mob of people try to shove their way onto the bus and the driver and the bus manager and a terminal manager try to only let the people with tickets on to the bus. When all the people with tickets are on the bus, they let the rest of the mob try to fill the empty seats. The bus doesn't leave the terminal until there's one person for every seat and only one person for every seat on the bus. We were fortunate enough to see another bus before ours go through this process before we had to dive in. One nice thing about mobs of Ecuadorian people is that all Ecuadorian people are considerably smaller than me, which makes maneuvering through mobs of them considerably easier. Es como si fuera yo un oso. Me llamaría un gorila pero ellos no tienen barba como yo. We finally go onto the bus, into our assigned seats (thank God we were sitting next to each other. And I'm serious about thanking God, especially that I had the aisle seat, I'll explain), and eventually the bus left the terminal.
I tell you what, riding public inter-city buses in Ecuador deserves its own blog post. Our first time, on the way to Playas from Guayaquil, a couple women had their dogs with them on the bus. Granted, they were little dogs that could be easily carried in both arms, but they were still living breathing dogs. All the buses pick up people off of the street, and charge them a little less than the full fare to go wherever they need to on the route. I think that's how the bus drivers and managers make enough money to do their thing and I personally to blame them or complain because it's their way of getting by. Eventually, the bus manager will come by and check your ticket or your money (for some inter-city buses, you don't pay until after you're on the bus. Ojalá que tengas el suelto propio.), and they come back through every twenty-ish minutes to collect from whoever they've picked up off the street. But not only do they pick up extra passengers, they pick up street vendors too. And the street vendors are selling all different kinds of things. From iced-down coconut juice, to coconuts themselves, to fried potatoes and plantains to cds and dvds. They just hop on the bus, sell whatever they have, and get off at a later stop. I'm pretty sure they must have some system, especially because we saw the same guy on both trips, to and from Playas, selling grapes on both buses. It's gotta be some sort of organized commerce. And it's acutally failry common for the passengers on the buses to buy the food for the ride to wherever they're going. Maybe next time I'll try to make sure I'm hungry when I need to take an inter-city bus.
Eventually we got to Playas, which is a definitely mainly a resort-y beach town designed for Ecuadorian vacationing. Fortunately, our hotel was in the middle of everything. It was two blocks from the bus station and it was on El Malecon (Spanish for sea-side road) so we were right up on the beach as well. We were solo un pasito from everything we wanted to do. Unfortunately, we didn't have a view of the beach from our room. Just a view the bars behind the hotel and the loud music they played all day and all night. As soon as we had our room, which had air-conditioning for which we had to pay a little extra, we put on our beach gear and headed out. Unfortunately, we didn't take any pictures of the restaurants on the beach, but there were tons and each of them had a woman kissing and waving at you to get you to eat in her restaurant. From outside they just look like shacks but we ended up letting a hisser lead us to her restaurant, through the middle of another restaurant, so we got to see what the kitchens looked like and the shack-like buildings are actually permanent structures with cement and mortar and the whole shebang. There were also other restaurants, ciruclar and up on poles a couple feet above sand-level. They were more official-looking and we ended eating in one of those too. I'll talk about that later.
The beach was packed; it looked like that the whole time we were in Playas, at some times even more full of people. Fortunately, we never felt like we had to fight anybody to have some space to ourselves on the beach. Sunday afternoon, we just hung out out there for a couple hours so we didn't do or eat anything too serious. We just sat on our towels and at one point I got up and got us encebollado. I'm not quite sure how to explain ecebbollado. It's probably a soup, because it's served in a bowl-like dish and there's enough liquid in it that everything else is always submerged. The liquid is some kind of vinegar-onion-tomato-cilantro concoction, and it had mote, fried potato, fish and a couple other indecipherable solid food things in it as well. I'm not quite sure what all was in it because I only had a couple tastes. I don't really do vinegar, and like I said everything else was submerged in it.
Sunday night, we went out to a dinner with some of our US friends from Cuenca, and we ended up drinking and hanging out with them in their hotel that night. I still think our drinking games are superior to the Ecuadorian ones I've tried.
The next morning, well I don't know when we woke up because it was whenever we felt like waking up. We got our stuff together and headed out to the beach. We ate breakfast in one of the shack-looking places, which was nothing to write home about, and then we headed to the beach. We got there later than most, but early enough to snag a beach umbrella with a couple chairs. There are people on the beach who own the setups and charge five dollars to use their umbrellas and chairs, but as soon as you pay the five bucks you've got a spot to yourself until you leave. So we posted up right there for over six hours, basically until Leslie got too cold and wanted to go back to the hotel and get ready for dinner and a walk along the beach. Whenever we wanted something, we left one at a time. We could have left our stuff under the umbrella and gone and done stuff together, but we had a cell phone and a book and cash and other things that we didn't feel like leaving and it was never too great a burden for one of us to get whatever we needed or go back into town by ourselves.
So that's pretty much what I did all day. Every once in a while, I'd go get in the water and ride or jump over or swim under some waves and come back to our spot and dry off and tan and
drink beer. I also drank beer pretty much all day, relaxing under our umbrella eating various beach foods. There was a Pilsener vendor who would walk by every fifteen minutes or so seeing who all needed more beer and she'd bring us a liter-bottle of Pilsener and two cups with ice (Pilsener is one of those [cheap] beers that has to be really cold to be enjoyed) for a dollar twenty-five. Normally a liter of Pilsener only costs a dollar, but somebody had to haul those bottles and bags of ice down to the beach and she was bringing them straight to us so we were glad to pay the extra quarter-a-piece. Back to the beach food. Maduros fritos are fried breaded plantains that we ate ever single time somebody walked by that was selling them. They taste like the richest moistest densest most flavorful pancakes you've ever eaten, they're about the size of two bananas and they cost between forty and seventy-five cents each, depending on how good your Spanish is and how much you can cut your words to sound like a coastal Ecuadorian. I also went into town and brought back a ton of empanadas for lunch. They were phenomenal, completely filled with things like cheese, chicken and veggies, beef and veggies, the napolitanas had cheese, tomato, olive oil and oregano, and we had some that had shrimp and cheese and oil and oregano. They were incredible.
Okay, so it's about time I do this. Here's a list of potential slogans I've thought up for Pilsener. They're all particularly appropriate because they're all true. Maybe one day I'll translate them and submit them for official use:
Pilsener: It's only a dollar!
Pilsener: It's what you do after Sunday mass.
Pilsener: It's what you do after anything.
Pilsener: It's also what you do before anything.
Pilsener: Hell, it's what you were doing anyways.
Pilsener: One for the walk home from the bar. (That's legal here.)
Pilsener: For when you wake up drunk. Every Friday.
Pilsener: It's better with ice!
Pilsener: Because you don't want to remember that your country sucks at soccer.
Pilsener: Official sponsor of Ecuadorian burps and farts.
Back to the weekend. Tuesday morning (we're not going in chronological order anymore, just talking about the stuff we did while we were chilling on the beach all weekend) while we were at the beach, I was in the water and I kept stepping on these smooth rock or shell-feeling things and I had no idea what they were. A dad was out there with his probably 9-year-old son and I watched him pull out of the water what looked to me like a sand dollar, except that it was the wrong color. He explained to me, in Spanish of course, that that's what it was, except that it was still alive.
This is what their shells look like. This is the side of them that faces up, the side I kept stepping on.
This is the side of them that is actually alive. Thousands of little prickly things that move around. Leslie thinks there must have been a storm the night before, because I brought over twenty of these living sand dollars back to shore to show Leslie the differences in their sizes and shapes and the ways their little star patterns look. I threw them all back, of course, and continued to feel more under my feet but didn't worry with picking them up after that.
Leslie wanted to make a sand castle Tuesday morning while I was out collecting sand dollars (that I threw back because they were living creatures), so while I was on the shore I took a few pictures of her making her castle. I posted this one because I timed it just right to capture the truck full of Ecuadorian military passing by as they patrolled the beach. Normally there were just pairs of navy-looking guys with billy clubs strolling the beach together, I assume just being a presence, but for some reason this morning there was a truck full of guys in cammo and kevlar and helmets. I guess they were just doing drills.
We really didn't do much more than relax and take in the sun and eat great food and drink, well, cheap beer while we were at the beach. We didn't do banana boats or anything like that; we just took in the sun and enjoyed being where we were.
Monday evening, during the hour sunset and the hour after, Leslie and I went for a walk down the shore. We collected several cool-looking shells, which eventually we plan to make into a wind chime like the ones we saw at all the little stalls where people were selling all sorts of touristy beach stuff like shell bracelets and shell wind chimes and big hats and dresses and sunglasses. We didn't buy anything, because there are plenty of places in Cuenca that have all that stuff for significantly cheaper.
This is a picture of me in the water while we were on our walk. Leslie wanted us to take pictures of each other at the shore because it was our last night and we hadn't been taking pictures of ourselves yet.
This is the best of the pictures I took of Leslie because I finally caught her when she wasn't posing. I had to get her to walk backwards into a small wave without looking so that she wouldn't be ready when it got to her feet.
We ended up on one end of the beach, where there were a bunch of people partying on the beach as it was getting dark. There were bars and dance floors and everything over there: too bad we hadn't gone earlier. Leslie and I both got a cocktail and continued on our walk, back towards our hotel. We ended up getting dinner ate one of the bigger more official-looking restaurants on the beach. We got there just as they were closing up shop, but they were happy for our business. I got a beer and we split a ceviche as an appetizer. Ceviche is a seafood soup, another vinegar-based soup, though I really liked this ceviche despite the high concentration of poison. Leslie was still on a shrimp thing, so she ordered some shrimp thing and I ordered "Arroz Marinero" after the waiter told me it was fried rice with a ton of seafood names and a "cangrejo completo." I figured it'd be a winner.
So it turns out cangrejo means crab. And my dinner came with a complete crab. It also had shellfish, scallops, shrimp, some fish, and some other stuff whose flavors got lost in the flood. It was an incredible dish and I was definitely completely satisfied when I finally finished it. Leslie and I went walking all around El Malecon and Via Data (the two main roads in town, both of which follow the shore), looking at all the touristy stuff that was being sold. We eventually ended up back in our room, tired and ready to fall asleep through whatever noise was coming in our windows. We got up Tuesday morning in time to head to the beach for a couple hours, take showers, get checked out of the hotel, go get a ton more empanadas for lunch, and pick up the next bus into Guayaquil. We got back into Guayaquil in time to get on a van to Cuenca in time to arrive just in time to head downtown for the last major event in celebration of Cuencan Independence, after going home to change back into cold-weather clothes of course.
It turns out President Correa was in town giving a speech in a building on the central square. All I lreaned from his speech, though I understood everything, was that he loves the sound of his own voice. This is a picture of him on a balcony watching the pyrotechnics stuff going on on the square.
After the speech and the two-story tower that was paraded around with all sorts of little things on it exploding, Leslie and I hit up a restaurant on the square for dinner. THe only notable thing that happened there was that they served us Colada Morada con un Guagua de Pan. Colada Morada it that purple drink that's very thick and very sweet and made with tons of different kinds of fruits. A Guagua de Pan is a bread baby. It's a tradition for All Souls Day. I have no idea what it has to do with anything, just that it's a traditional sweet food eaten after Ecuadorians commemorate their dead ancestors by visiting them in the cemetery.
After the Colada Morada and Guagua de Pan we went over to the stage, where a bad was playing traditional Cuencan music. We heard "Por eso que te quiero Cuenca" for the first time. It's one of the most famous and most popular of the traditional Cuencan songs. A lot of our friends told us we'd have to hear it at some point before leaving the country.
I'd like to close this long blog post by thanking Joe and Susan again for their gracious graduation gift. I hope this blog post allows me to share the wonderful experience Leslie and I had this past weekend and I hope it fully expresses my gratitude to you.
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