Beach Daze: Sept. 14-19, 2011

Five days in Montañita, including a weekend, were definitely more than enough for me. The day I arrived I met a New Yorker named Franklin working across the street from the hostel I checked into... thank goodness for that. Where ever I go it never ceases to amaze me how some people are just natural nexus points... connected in all the right ways with all the right people. Thanks to Franklin I soon moved to the hostel he was living at just out of town for $5 a night. However, before moving in with Franklin and his crew, I fell victim to an apparently common trap in a tourist pueblo like Montañita. Whcn I checked in to the Papaya I paid up front for my room that night, as I did the next day. When I went to check out and tried to recover a jacket I had left in the room, they tried to charge me again. My Spanish not being up to par for such an incident, I hunted down Franklin to figure this out. Turns out some local saw me waiting at reception and quickly assumed the role of host in order to pocket the cash himself. After some discussion the matter was cleared up and I was spared the extra charge, but my jacket was history... I liked that jacket. Anyhow, good riddance to the tourist core of that town, Franklin had warned me that I´d appreciate living a bit out of town once the weekend hit, and he wasn´t kidding. Even nearly a kilometre away from the center the thump of club bass could be heard all Saturday night until 8 am in the morning.

Before Montañita became what it is today, it was a peaceful little fishing village on a beautiful beach coast in Ecuador. But sure enough, some surfer dudes discovered it and their compadres flocked to one of the longest, if not the longest, right breaks in the country. With surfers comes surfer culture which sometimes includes a bit of the party animal. When I checked out of tourist central, aka Hostal Papaya, and headed for Franklin´s place, Hostal Sol Playa Cafe, some of the surfer culture met me there. Five Aussie guys had checked in a couple days before me and set the tone at the hostel of "la fiesta mejor". The morning I moved in we had a nice fire in the back as one of the first blue-sky days during my stay unfurled above us and the beach beckoned just a hop, skip, and a jump from where we were sitting.

Much of my time in Montañita was spent walking to and from town exploring all the different ways to get around. I enjoyed the carnivale style atmosphere of the pueblo as locals from Guayaquil flooded in for the weekend. An electronic music festival of sorts dominated the town and surrounding beaches for two days. All of this was puctuated by long beach strolls, a couple of surf sessions, and lots of reading. The night I spent in Latacunga I was fortunate enough to have been in a hostel with one of very few foreign language book exchanges. I picked up a tome of a novel titled "Galileo´s Dream". It saved me quite a bit of what might have turned into lonely torment in paradise and also helped me appreciate the many hammocks that populated the Montañitan landscape. Now I´ve donated that book to Hostal Sol Playa Cafe and their newly formed book exchange.

An aspect of Ecuador that finally hit me while in Montañita is how much animals are simply a part of life around here. Whether in a city, the countryside, or a pueblo, they´re everywhere. Llamas, cows, mules, horses, and chickens wander the streets with no apparent human supervision. While sitting in a any number of cafes or restaurants it wasn´t uncommon for a dog to wander in, check out the patrons, or even curl up at your feet. One evening while strolling down an empty stretch of beach, four dogs came out of nowhere and cruised with me for awhile before sauntering off to where ever they had to go.

Then there´s the wildlife...far more abundant and obvious along the coast. There are many varieties of birds, most of them quite vocal, iguanas around some of the rivers, and along the beach, when no people were around, whole communities of crabs would scurry around by the dozens. They would dance with each other, fight, scurry some more, and then pop back down their toonie sized holes. Quite entertaining to watch.

So after a few nights of celebration, a few days of true relaxation, a little delerium, and plenty of sun and heat, it was time to plan the next leg of the journey. My buddy Ryan finally got back to me... turns out he had been completely unplugged a little ways out of Montañita, too bad we missed each other. On the bright side, Alex (from Quito) gave me a few ideas of where to go next. He suggested three places: Baños, Cuenca, and Mancora. After a brief visit to the internet cafe I decided that as beautiful as Baños is, it was just too far back north for my liking. Cuenca, on the other hand is situated slightly south of Guayaquil, which puts me right on track for the Peruvian border and Mancora... so next stop... back to the Andes!