Letters Back Home: Ecuador

     Well, the thing about the Galapagos is that it’s extremely expensive. Really the only way to go there is on a cruise, and the least you can get that for is US$700, so that was kind of ruled out. Some other time...

     I think I should be good on the money. We have more or less 12 days of travel left, so I bet I can tweak that to get me back home with $0.

     We hit our maximum northern limit yesterday in a town called San Lorenzo, Ecuador, which sits in the salty mangrove marshes right south of the Colombian border. It was a pretty dodgy place, but certainly a huge culture change from what we've seen for the past 20 days. Since we left Argentina, we'd traveled through the South American highlands with plump little ladies wrapped in hundreds of colorful blankets, huge markets selling all sorts of sweaters and textiles, lots of potatoes, lots of corn, and lots of llama wool. Coming down from Quito in one days travel brought us to a place where, first of all, everyone is black (the entire region is deemed Afro-Ecuadorian, since this is the place where most escaped slaves made it to settle down), the days and nights are hot and humid, and people sell dried salted fish, mangoes, coconuts, grilled bananas, and other weird fruits on the streets instead of beets, potatoes, corn, and squash.

     People walk around barefoot in the permanently muddy streets, and speak a very hard to understand dialect of afro-Spanish. In San Lorenzo, I ate the best seafood I've ever eaten in my life. It was an entire fish in spicy coconut sauce, with a huge pile of rice and fried bananas.
This morning, we took two boats and a bus to get to where we are now, and we've got an 8:30 departure that will take us all night to the more beachy part of the coast. There are no beaches here.

      It’s like the everglades - all mangrove marsh, and all the tin-roofed wooden houses are build up high on stilts just jutting out over the water, the boats we took went through the trees, and I was totally amazed that the drivers could remember the routes that they took. It was literally like a maze of canals where you could hardly tell where the next turn was coming up.
     The town we ended up making a boat connection in - a tiny little muddy village built all in rickety wood and tin, had a little celebration for their father’s day, where there were men and women dancing in huge brightly colored clothing to drum music. That was cool to see.

Sleeping accommodations in Montañita

Boat travel in the mangroves

Tomorrow morning we'll be in Montañita, supposedly a very nice little beach town, where we'll be for 5 full days, kind of taking a vacation in the sun to both calm us after a good 20 days of very fast very intense traveling through some very high very cold places, and the wind our time here down before going back home.

An eternity of windy cold comes to an end at an Ecuadorian beach