Feliz Año Nuevo!

On January 2, 2007, we left Montañita for Guayaquil where we´d hoped to somehow find a bus across the Peruvian border. We were looking forward to see Peru - Damon and Joss whom we´d met in Montañita had given us some great recommendations for places to go besides of course Machu Picchu. Lonely Planet-less for more than a month already, we were feeling quite lost and were burning a lot of time trying to do our own research online. It was impossible to find any Lonely Planets in South America, let alone one in English.

Anyway, armed with only enough information to get us to our next destination (Mancorra, a coastal town in Peru), we bought 2 tickets back to Guayaquil on the 5am bus. We bought these tickets at 4:45 am and were the last people they sold tickets to that morning. Luckeee. Then we found out that the bus was full and we would have to go in a mini van for the 3 hour ride. This would have been perfectly fine had it not been for the fact that they sold more tickets than there was room for. It was a creative exercise in trying to find the least painful way to survive the 3 hour ride without developing a blood clot or pulling a muscle.

The Terrestre bus station in Guayaquil is a beastly experience especially if you speak 2 week old Spanish. Over 60 different bus companies from which to buy tickets on a day when just about everyone is trying to get home from wherever they spent New Years´. Traveling by bus is the most economical and most popular mode of travel in South America. There are really comfortable options if you pay a little more; you can get a large comfy seat that reclines all the way flat, there are bathrooms on board as well as food service and waiters. This was the sort of cushy bus that we had planned on taking from Ecuador to Peru. Until we found out that it would take 60 hours to get from Guayaquil to Cusco. And besides the bus was full.

Silly us, thinking that we could do Peru in one and a half weeks.

On a trip like this, it is best not to fight against where the winds want to steer you and so, after struggling with whether or not to change our plans, we decided that we would be better off skipping Peru and adding the one and a half weeks to Argentina instead. We were so disappointed but plan to come back to Peru better equipped, and with a smarter plan. We walked from the bus station to the airport and booked ourselves on the first flight out to Mendoza, Argentina, scheduled to depart in a good 13 hours.

Hippy Holidays in Montañita

Monteñita is a tiny town on the Ecuadorian coast with a hippy vibe and Ecuador´s premier surf break, which Mike says isn´t saying much. Its one main street is packed with hostels, bars, restaurants, hemp jewelry and dreamcatchers for sale, dreadlocks and stray dogs. The aforementioned hippy vibe is more like a wanna-be hippy vibe, like nouveau hippies who read the manual on how to be a hippy:
1)First and most importantly, dread your hair, even if you are white or balding or out of shape or all of the above. If you don´t have enough hair, get extensions.
2)Learn to juggle. Practice it whenever you can. Then juggle for tips.
3)Learn to fire dance. Do it for tips.
4)You don't need shoes.
5)Learn to make hemp jewelry. Make jewelry all day long and sell it to tourists.

We rolled into town without accomodations two days before Christmas. It made us a little nervous but we were very lucky to find a room at Charo´s Hostel which was where we wanted to stay in the first place. We were looking forward to tucking into one place and staying through the holidays. It was super clean and safe and off the overly crowded and noisy main street. Best part of all was the immediate and abundant hot water - a luxury we´d been deprived of for quite a while. Charo and her husband were great. Mr. Charo (we never knew his name but Mr. Charo seemed appropriate) was a one man hospitality squad, great to talk to especially during his afternoon beer and cigarette break on his favorite hammock.

The crowd continued to grow exponentially as we neared New Year´s Eve. Little Monteñita was bursting at the seams with every daily batch of backpackers and city folk from the nearby town of Guayaquil. Within a day, we started recognizing and renaming all the people in the neighborhood: Chicken Man - from whom we bought countless $2.50 chicken dinners to the point of embarrasment, Poeta - the late night drink cart bartender, Ronaldo - our favorite beach bartender, Town Drunk #1 - who spent all of Christmas Eve and Christmas day dancing with a bottle of whisky or passed out in a heap of roadside rubble, Town Drunk #2 - a sketchy American who tried to scam every newcomer by telling them his wallet got stolen and can they spare some change, Angry Italian - the personality deficient owner and chef of the Italian restaurant we frequented called El Zociedad. The best steaks but the slowest dinner you will ever have.

Mike surfed every day and we spent a lot of time on the beach. With the absence of Christmas decorations, carols, friends and family, a heaping dinner and cold weather, Christmas didn´t feel much like Christmas. It sort of came and went feeling like any other day. The day after Christmas, Mike had his T-shirt, flip flops and cap stolen from the beach while he was in the water. That really put a damper on the day. :(

Our first night at El Zociedad, we ordered a bottle of wine and played cards to while away the evening. We met a lovely group of people at the next table and ended up dining with them the next night (at the same place) and having a great time. Joss and Peter who live in Boulder, Joss´ brother Damon who lives and works in Ecuador and their lovely mom Suzanne, a professor at MIT. It was so great to have people other than ourselves to talk to. We really enjoyed their company and were sad when they left town. Los Dos Chamorros were alone again with their lazy daily routine of sleeping a lot, Chicken Man, beach, Chicken Man, internet, surf, Chicken Man.





In the days leading up to 2007, the locals start to celebrate the new year by celebrating the end of the old year. Home made paper mache mannequins begin to make an appearance outside every establishment in town. This is aan annual tradition where bubblegum-pink-skinned mannequins are made to resemble people they don't like, usually politicians or famous people (there were a lot of Bart Simpsons, we didn´t quite understand the significance of that). They are kicked around and burned at midnight leaving their charred remains all over town.



The kids in town dress up like banditos, wearing homemade cardboard masks held in place and framed by the neck of a T-shirt tied tightly around their heads. They walk around town for a whole week before new years, asking for money. They too represent the old year and by giving them money, you bid farewell to the old year and everything bad that was in it, making way for the new year.



At around eleven on New Years' Eve, we made our rounds to Poeta's drink cart, then to Ronaldo's beach bar, then at the stroke of midnight, about 50 people with surfboards started running into the pitch black ocean to a screaming crowd. Fireworks were going off everywhere in town and on the beach to the battling sounds of reggae, techno and reggaeton. The clubs were full of people partying til dawn. Los Dos Chamorros rocked it til 3, wooh, crazy.

To see photos of Montañita, go to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/31967627@N00/sets/72157594475793598/

Ecuador

Ice cream break with Monica and Paulo

Quito, the capital city of Ecuador, is where we dip our proverbial toe into the great continent of South America. This is where we had planned to take a 2 week intensive Spanish course before we continuing into the mostly Spanish speaking beyond. We arrive in Quito after another 35 hour journey to find that our luggage never made it. Dressed for 80 degree Africa, we step out into the brisk low 60s evening, really really bummed that we only had the thin clothes on our backs for at least the next 24 hours. Gustavo, the owner of our Spanish school had been waiting a good 2 hours at the airport for our delayed flight and lost luggage fiasco. But he was all smiles and was unwavering in his patience until he safely delivered us to our freezing cold, dank, crap hotel. But it was alright, we only had one night there. The next night we would depart for the coast for our first week of classes.

The next day, worried that our bags might not arrive, we went shopping for another change of clothes in case this was all we had to take to the coast with us. Thankfully, we found our bags on the carousel later in the day when we returned to the airport. Yipee!!

We met Monica and Paulo, our young (26 and 25 year old!) teachers at the bus station at 8 in the evening, for our overnight bus to a blink-and-you´ll-miss-it town on the coast called Puerto Rico. They spoke very little English and we spoke little to no Spanish. Initial conversation contained a lot of smiles and hand gestures and very slow speaking. The 11 hour bus ride we were not looking forward to turned out to be much worse than imagined. We drove downhill almost the entire time at top speed, angling through windy mountain roads. Music was blasting through the speaker all night and the finicky thermostat in the bus swept between bone chilling tundra to suffocating milky humidity. It was impossible to sleep or go to the bathroom. Yes there was a bathroom in the bus but you couldn´t make it down the aisle from all the breaking and violent turning let alone actually pee in the pitch black bathroom once you got there. We were sure to die from driving off the cliff or in a head on collision with another bus. When we arrived at 6:30 in the morning, we were ecstatic to be alive. After a shower and some breakfast, we launched into 5 hours of intenive Spanish. We were hanging onto our last sleep deprived nerve, trying our hardest to concentrate and make it through the day. Our intructors, a good 10 years younger than we, were excellent teachers. We spent almost every waking hour with them, hanging out and eating all our meals together.



By day two we had enough new words to have a rudimentary conversation, still needing to switch to English to get some points across. By day 3, it felt as if our heads would explode and bloody Spanish phrases and present tense verbs would spray all over the furniture. That being said, it is the only way to learn a language and we learned very fast. At the end of 5 days, we returned to Quito for the weekend and remained there for the next week of classes.



Roughly 9,000 feet above sea level, Quito is nestled at the base of an emerald (and still active) volcano in the Andes mountains. Ecuador is so named because the Equator runs right through it, about 15 miles north of Quito.

The temperature ranges between the 70s and 80s in the daytime and cools down to the 50s and 60s in the evenings. It happened to be unseasonable rainy the entire rest of the time we were in Quito. It poured every afternoon at around 3, making it difficult for us to see any of the sights after class. We ended up putzing around a part of town aptly nicknamed "Gringolandia" for the many hostels, internet cafes, restaurants and bars there catering to foreigners.

Food wise, the Ecuadorians sure know how to do soup. Soup is eaten at almost every meal as a first course, followed by some sort of meat or fish dish and rice and dessert. The Ecuadorians also do love a good Guinea Pig, called "Cuy." Cuy is a favorite meal, usually prepared whole and deep fried, complete with little ears and paws and face. This was a little too close to eating our own pet, so we could not bring ourselves to try it. Paulo took us to a great local lunch-only spot where we could eat lunch for an unbeatable $1.25 each! Usually a huge bowl of soup and a plate or chicken or fish with rice and a small chunk of vegetables and a glass of juice. Perfect if you have small change. Ecuador has been using the American dollar since 2000 I believe, but there is a prevalent change problem. They say that a $20 note is worth about as much as a roll of toilet paper. A $5 bill is pushing your luck.

After two weeks with Paulo and Monica, we were armed with a decent number of present and past tense verbs to use on our trip. The problem usually arises when people reply in rapid fire Spanish, using the three other tenses we did not learn and we´re reduced to bumbling gringos again. Still, it´s made a huge difference to be able to communicate on a very basic level. We may not be discussing the meaning of life with the next guy, but we´re able to get rooms, food, alcohol and the bathroom which is all one really needs. We finished our classes on December 22 and hightailed it back over to the coast to a tiny little pueblo called Monteñita.