Sun, Salt, and Sand

This weekend I remembered what utter contentment feels like.

I also remembered what sunburn feels like.

Thus was my weekend at the beach at Atacames and Sua.

Getting there was an adventure involving no bus tickets anywhere in the city on Thursday night, sleeping in the bus terminal (cold bus terminal) until 5 am when some guy had a bus to somewhere, so we hopped on it.  Ended up getting to Atacames by way of Santo Domingo, Esmeraldas, and Sua.  So 3 buses and a taxi ride later, (and about 14 hours from first arriving in the Quito bus terminal) we got to the beach.

View of Atacames from the play at Sua

Atacames is a lovely town full of seafood, three wheeled taxis made out of motorcycles, and music during the wee hours of the morning.  It's also got a beach, and the town of Sua a 10 minute bus ride up the hill.

Sua, it doesn't get prettier than this

Sua is kind of the same, just a lot more tranquil.  We made friends our first night in Atacames who lived in Sua, and went with two of them, Bernardo (Ecuadorean) and Jessica (from Wisconsin) on Saturday to Estero de Plátano, a beach somewhere between an hour and a half and two and a half hours away, depending on the availability of a truck to hitch hike in.  We took a bus about an hour away, and then waited on the corner for a truck heading down our road to hop in the back of.  Eventually one happened along, and with the addition of our 6 people, I think there was somewhere around 23 people in the back of the truck.  I couldn't really do a good count since people were blocking people.

Although you can't tell it, there were about 18 more people surrounding us.

We had a bunch of lazy hours on the beach, I spent a couple of them enjoying the not-warm-but-nowhere-near-Puget-Sound-cold waters of the Pacific.  The waves were the perfect kind of tepid to just lounge in, and try to not get any more salty water than strictly necessary in your mouth or eyes (which stung).

Julia, Cheryl, Jessica, Bernardo, me, and Michelle after a lovely day at playa Esterno de Plátano.

I took a nap in the shade under a tree, Julia, Michelle and I went and got some ceviche (cold shrimp soup type dish with cilantro, onions, and tomatoes), rice, and fried bananas for lunch along with a pina colada milkshake (all for $6) then we reversed the process to get home, hopping in the back of another pickup heading back up the road.  They were headed all the way back to Atacames, so we skipped the bus portion of the trip.

The ride back into town, sitting in the back of a pickup

That evening after jumping in the water again at the Atacames beach, I showered and headed up to the roof balcony of our hotel.  Just at the right time too, since the sun was just going down over the rooftops of the city.  With the sun painting the sky full of colors, a warm, soft breeze from the ocean, and the distant sounds of techno and reggeton music as the city woke up for the night, I once again remembered what utter contentment felt like.

Contentment.  Utter contentment.

With nothing to do, nowhere to be, I could just enjoy the beauty of the city in front of me and realize how wonderful it is to be in Ecuador.  I'm learning so much, and having so much fun, and also getting to visit spectacular places like this.  I'm taking a step away from the busy, hurried, always planned culture of the United States, and realizing that sometimes you just have to stop worrying and live in the moment.  That's so much easier here, since Ecuadoreans have little concept of time, which is the perfect segue into the story of our next day.

In short, the four of us took a boat ride with our Ecuadorean friends to a beach, watched said boat leave, and then went surfing.

The boat ride out around the island, to the beach.  This island had albatross flying around the top, and I think blue-footed boobies nesting on it.

Those that taught me to surf, left to right is Giovanni, Jonathan, and Jerry.

We had plans to be back in town by 1:00 to shower, change, and head to the bus terminal for the 7 hour ride home.  Somewhere around noon we realized that our friends didn't actually have a plan for getting us home.  There were some scenes that should have been in a movie, watching guys running and hollering on the beach, waving t-shirts and surfboards above their heads trying to flag down a boat to take us back to Sua, all that was missing was the signal fire.  That was to no avail, so we embarked on an epic trek via feet.

It was an ish-hour long trek up a path (since the beach was ringed by cliffs, said cliffs sticking into the water on either side of the beach preventing us from walking back to Sua) through a cow pasture (containing cows) through some fences and a forest, across a river, and along a road until we made it back to town.

The south end of our stuck-beach had some fantastic geology going on.  Yes, there were ripple marks, I checked.  Also some sweet micro-faulting.

A bus ride later we were in Atacames, and went to the terminal to change our tickets or get new ones, since we had called them when we knew we wouldn't make the bus, and once we managed to find tickets for that evening (though it was difficult) we showered the salt and dirt off at our hostel, run by very nice people, and of all things, headed back to Sua with the guys.

No big, there's just fresh fish being chopped in the background, since we're going to have a fish fry in Ecuador.

We ended up having the most authentic meal yet in Ecuador at the house of one of the guys: fresh fish caught today that they bought straight from the boat in Atacames, two kinds of bananas bought from the market, and juice squeezed from the lemons on the tree in the back yard.  After dinner we caught a bus back into Atacames, gathered our things, and hopped on the bus after buying some pastries from our favorite panadería in town.  6 hours later, we arrived at Quitumbre terminal in Quito at 4 am, caught the trolley back north to where our houses are, and once home I sat down to do my homework.

This is definitely a story of all's well that ends well, and we had fun along the way.  Now I can add getting stranded on a beach and missing my bus back home to the list of 'That One Time in Ecuador' stories.  Next weekend is going to Montañita, another beach town, where we hope to take a trip to an island where blue-footed boobies live, for a taste of Los Galápagos without quite such an expense.

As always, stay tuned.

p.s I did this.  It didn't get it's own blog post, but it involved riding bareback for the first time, and galloping on a horse for the first time, all at once.  This was in Cumbayá, 20 minutes out of Quito when we visited some friends, and they just happened to have another friend with horses.  Viva Ecuador!

That's me galloping bareback on a horse in Ecuador.  Yep, I can't believe it either.

I've been told I should go join the Ecuadorean circus too.  We'll see.