Photos From Ecuador

Here are a few photos of our time spent in Ecuador. Not the most exciting country in South America, but far from it's worse. As you travel up the west coast of the continent from Argentina north you can't help but notice that Ecuador marks not only the equator but the start of Caribbean America. Suddenly it gets hot and humid, suddenly people are no longer white or indigenous but sporting the rich hues of Africa. Jungle covers the interior and the sea is a bit warmer to swim in. This was particularly noticeable to us because we travelled through the southern winter months.

The famous tourist beach of Ecuador is Montanita. It was cheap and backpacker friendly. The surfing waves were great and if you looked carefully you could spot the small hippy weed smoking community. We did a great day excursion to hump back whales from Montanita.

After Montanita we spent a few days travelling up the coast on buses. One journey involved changing buses in the middle of the jungle. On that particular journey a passenger put his baby pig in the luggage hold of the bus. The little critter shat on my wife's backpack.

Sua and Canoa were average beaches. It was the weekend and people poured into the seaside towns at night to dance to loud salsa music and get pissed. A big bottle of beer was only $1. And I mean literally $1 since Ecuador uses American money. I can't decide if this is a good thing for their economy or not.

In Quito we heard numerous stories about the murder rate in the city. It did seem to have its problems - we saw kids jacking up on the street - but perhaps no more than any other big city in South America.

My wife collapsed while we were walking around Quito taking in the colonial sights. A kind taxi driver drove us to a private hospital who were very efficient and also had English speaking doctors. It turned out she was just hyper-ventilating. But the good thing was that they found numerous parasites living in her stomach left over from food poisoning in Bolivia and Peru. Getting the right antibiotics to treat the problem was definitely worth the $50 odd dollars that it finally cost us.

From Quito we caught buses over the border and into Colombia. After a few days in Colombia I realized just how average Ecuador is.

Cuenca

Montanita

Montanita

Isla de La Plata

Canoa

Sua

Quito

A Perfect Man in Medillin

Chuck Aranal the semi professional body boarder was a definite type. The type who you just know will never get into trouble, indestructible. A man who could stroll through a battle field with bullets flying left, right and centre, mines under foot exploding, bombs falling from the sky and he would emerge from the conflict unscathed and a hero. And naturally such a gift was given to an irritatingly shallow man who could do nothing except boast. We met Chuck in Pablo Escobar`s hometown in Columbia, Medellin. He was a tall golden boy with dark curly auburn hair and square-jawed good looks from Newcastle in Australia. He was travelling with a spotty mop haired sidekick surfer dude who also hailed from Newcastle. Chuck was a non-stop talker and his sole topic was of course himself. At any pause in the conversation he would look to take centre stage, which funnily enough as he got more stoned, he found harder to do. It was our first night in the city. We were staying in the Casa Kiwi Hostel. I had scored my usual box of cheap red wine and was sitting around the communal table in the back garden guzzling plonk and smoking tabs trying to get a bit of distance. My dear wife was hustling in the kitchen to concoct a nourishing slop for our evening meal. I had just met Danny from Huddersfield and we were enjoying a good natter about footie and drugs, as you do. Chuck and his mate sat down at the table and started making friendly noises so I found him a glass and poured him a helping of box wine. This started his first big ‘me’ conversation about how he used to work in a ‘bottle shop’ and how it was his job to pick the wines. He bizarrely enough liked my cheap plonk and began a tedious monologue about his ‘bottle shop’ days. It was hard to tell what his job description actually was. Perhaps he was a manager or perhaps he was a box shifter, but boy could he rabbit on. I could see total boredom enveloping Danny like a cloud. Luckily, the conversation moved on. It turned out that Chuck was waiting on a guy who worked in the hostel to score some weed for him. Chuck`s mate bought up the possibility that the local in question looked pretty rough and beaten up and he might be conning them. Chuck thought otherwise – of course the bloke would come through, after all this was Chuck Aranal we were talking about. Danny was visible heartened by the escape from the ‘bottle shop’ reminisces and just to make sure that subject was truly dead and buried he started upon the pertinent topic of drugs. This sent Chuck into overdrive. Man had they snorted a lot of coke in Columbia. Death defying amounts. One evening they picked up an ‘8 ball’ (I forget how many grammes that is). Not only did they do it in one night, but they tried to do it in one line each! Chuck gleefully described how his silent spotty partner in crime had only got through half his mega line when snotty white stuff started oozing from his nostril. That led on to the astonishing claim that in the six weeks that they had been travelling from Mexico to Columbia they had only had six days when they didn`t ‘party’. I made a quick calculation that`s one day a week or 2 days a month of sobriety. And then just on cue the dodgy geezer appeared and gave Chuck the nod and they both vanished to make a deal. It was good timing for my wife had also finished cooking so we sat down to our pasta slop with bread and wine.

After dinner Chuck reappeared with the smug grin of a man in possession of gear. He showed me a bag with about an eighth in and told me how wickedly strong it was and how reasonably priced it was. His only problem was that he didn`t have any papers to roll with. Me being me had a ready supply for just such a contingency; so off I went to rummage in my pack. We reconvened on the decking at the front of the hostel with my wife and Danny in tow. As Chuck clumsily got a number together he told us of some of his plans. They were heading south. They were keen to find surf. First up were the breaks in Peru, then Chile, Argentina and finally Brazil. Astonishingly enough Chuck thought they might have to miss out Machu Picchu for lack of time. This struck me as being profoundly bigoted and not a tad Australian. And then Chuck said the oddest thing. They planned to fly to Las Vegas for two weeks and then fly back to Brazil to continue their surf tour

Danny: Las Vegas?
Chuck: Yeah my dad`s paying for me and my mate to meet him in Las Vegas.
Danny: Why?
Chuck: Because I`m going away for two years and he won`t get to see me.
Danny: Where you going, mate?


It was obvious to me and my wife that Danny was taking the piss. However, the moment passed as the much anticipated joint was finally ready, a badly made one skin. It only made it around the circle once but my couple of tokes hit the spot. Chuck apologized for this sign of imperfection and then made the incredible assertion that everybody in Australia only smoked weed from a bong.


Chuck to me: You ever heard of the Darién pipe in Mexico?
Me: No. Oil pipe? Chuck: Surf pipe, dude. You could fit a bus in that pipe.
Me: Whoa. Chuck: Some of the waves were the size of the one, no two, no third story of this building.
Danny: No way.
Chuck: No kidding. We were in a hotel 500 metres away from the beach and even from that distance the waves looked huge. There`s a picture I took with my camera. I can go and get my camera and show you.
Danny: That`s alright. Chuck: There`s a dude in the picture and he`s tiny in comparison to the wave. I thought it politic to move the conversation on; after all we wanted Chuck to make another of his shoddy single skin efforts.
Me: And after you get back from Las Vegas to Brazil and do some surfing, you`re going back to Oz, right?
Chuck: No we`re going to Sweden for a year. We`ve got Swedish working holiday visas.
Side tick: Swedish work visas are cheaper than UK ones.
Chuck: And Sweden is full of hot chicks; there`s snowboarding and my mate got some kind of council job in Sweden and he makes loads of coin.
Me: What`s he do?
Before Chuck could answer Danny butted in with the obvious.
Danny: He`s a councilor.
Chuck smiled and didn`t take offence. Instead he set to work on joint number two. And while he clumsily worked on that he continued to expand on their plans.
Chuck: And after Sweden we go to Canada.
Danny: How long do you think all that will take?
Chuck: About two years.
Chuck: I figure if you`re gonna take time out when you`re 21 you might as well do it in style.

At that point Chuck complained about joints and started off on an eulogy about bongs and his perfect set up in his garage (presumably his parent`s garage) with sofas and the world`s biggest and most perfect water pipe. As the lumpy joint made the round we giggled at the thought of a bong the size of a Japanese car. The Colombian gear was impressive, stronger than the standard Paraguayan fare we had been used to smoking throughout South America. We chatted about this and this spurred Chuck on to make the announcement he was heading out to buy a bong. I checked my watch. It was eleven o`clock. I told him that seemed unlikely at this time and besides how wise was it to walk the streets of a Colombian city late at night.?Chuck manfully pushed aside these reservations and told us that he had spotted a man selling bongs on the street in a nearby square and besides he could do with a Big Mac. His spotty wingman also fancied a burger. And so stubbing out the joint the two Australian heroes departed to score a bong. Danny and I thought their mission absurd but I conceded that it was most evident to me that Chuck was indestructible and he might well prove us wrong and re-appear with his much vaunted bong. Indeed we both wanted him to return and continue to share his stash.

It was over an hour before Chuck and his mate returned. They hadn`t managed to buy a bong. Instead they had got a taxi to a McDonalds to indulge in globalised burger sins. He promised to join us in a bit but first he wanted to hang with some other travelers and let them bask in the glow of his perfection. So Danny and I got a beer from reception and shot the breeze. It was a beautiful warm night without mosquitoes. Chuck emerged from the dorm thirty minutes later with three big blunts. He sparked up the first and hit over-drive.

Chuck: I am a semi-professional body boarder. I`ve made money in body boarding competitions and been sponsored and shit. This one time in Mexico I entered a body board competition. Cost me a few bucks. And guess what?
Me: What? Chuck: I won it! I busted out some great moves and won it.
Danny: What was the prize?
Chuck: It was a new shinny scooter all chrome. It was cool. I drove it around Mexico for a week then sold it for a thousand bucks.

The joint was really pokey and I was fading in and out of reality as Chuck was giving us the good news. My wife had had enough and went to bed. I stayed for the next one. By this point Chuck was slowing down and Danny and I were struggling to form sentences. Stoned silence is not a bad thing to my way of thinking, but to Chuck it was producing existential discomfort. He wanted a captive audience. He squirmed on his seat as he tried to prolong the stories of his exploits. It was too much for me. I went to bed and stared into the dark listening to the multiple conversations going on in my head before blissfully passing out.

The next morning Chuck sold me the remains of his gear before heading out in search of waves. My wife and I had an awesome day in the city. We went to the botanical gardens and the Fernando Botero museum; cultural stuff of no interest to Chuck. Thinking back to the previous night I realized how convoluted Chuck`s proposed journey was: Brazil, Las Vegas, Sweden and Canada and yet no Asia or Africa. His exposition was full of half baked assumptions about hot chicks and loads of money and his idiom was so full of ‘dudes’ and surf jargon that it left me pondering how does Chuck manage to be so perfect and untouchable and yet so superficial and self-centred? It struck me that shallowness can be perfected and can produce something wonderful that deserves some type of admiration. As Oscar Wilde wrote, “Ignorance is like a delicate fruit; touch it, and the bloom is gone.”

Playa Blanca in Colombia

Playa Blanca is an incredible caribbean beach that is perfectly under-developed where you can camp or rent a hammock. There are no annoying hotels with pools or hostels full of 20 something hormonally-charged twerps getting pissed. There are no boutique shops, there are no dickheads with ATVs. Instead there's blue skies, warm clean water, pelicans, cows and a few basic businesses. Playa Blanca is on an island, a short distance away from the old colonial port town of Cartagena in Colombia. Because it's the caribbean it's always hot. How to get there? Well there's the expensive way and there's the cheap way. The expensive but convenient way is to take a speed boat from Cartagena port. You have to haggle for the boat price (we got our tickets for $15 per person) and then you have to pay a port tax ($6 per person). The boat takes about an hour. It's a flat bottom boat that violently bobs up and down even on the smoothest waters. On the return journey with the boat you have to negotiate with the captain and you don't pay tax. We got it for $7.50 per person. Alternatively, there's a bus going from the market in Cartagena. Again you have to haggle. The big saving is there's no port tax. Once you get to Playa Blanca there's nothing to do but relax. Swim, smoke blow, lie in a hammock, play with the dogs, get a massage, chat with the locals. In the evening the sun sets over the ocean. A magic time for a rum and coke and a spliff on the beach. It's a really long beach. It gets a few boat loads of tourists every afternoon, but they just stop for a meal and a swim and then go home. On Saturday and Sunday masses of locals catch the bus to the beach, but they all congregate in the one corner and get pissed. That's the only time you see the police there; to control the weekend binge drinkers. We stayed in the middle of the beach next to a small restaurant and shop. We were the only one's staying there. We had 3 dogs to guard our stuff. We camped literally on the beach, only 10 metres from the water's edge. The food in the restaurant was limited (chicken or fish with chips or rice) and it was comparatively expensive. We knew this was going to be the case so we bought water, tinned food, jam, bread and biscuits with us. During our three blissful nights on the beach we hardly spent anything. It was basic living - the shower and toilet were open air - but anymore would definitely be less in my opinion. Playa Blanca was quite possibly my favourite place in South America. Why? The beautiful beach, the warmest water, the isolation, the nature, the friendly people and the lack of people.

Sunset with great rum and good green. What a winner! The bucket shower. $2 per bucket.

The restaurant with our guard dogs snoozing.

Just behind our tent was a lagoon with cows. One night they passed en masse in front of our tent; much to the chagrin of the dogs.

Our tent with basic tarp covering for shade.