From Texan to Quiteño: The Beach

This weekend we went to Atacames, a town on the northern coast of Ecuador. Before I get around to recounting the details of our trip, there are a few memories from the previous weekend (my host brothers' combined birthday party) that deserve to be preserved for posterity.

But first: my host mother is adorable

The cracker game: the rules are simple. One tilts one's face back, places a cracker on one's forehead, and uses facial expressions to move said cracker to one's mouth. This will be played at every gathering I am involved in organizing when I come back to the states.

The chocolate game: for this game you will need: dice, a winter hat, gloves, a scarf, a butter knife, a fork, and a large chocolate bar that is divided into squares. The players go around in a circle rolling the dice until someone gets a six. When this happens, whoever rolled the six must put on the hat, gloves, and scarf, and use the knife and fork (no hands!) to cut into the (still wrapped) chocolate bar and eat the candy square-by-square. While this is happening, the other players continue to roll the dice until someone else gets a six. Once someone else gets a six, the person who was eating the chocolate before must stop what they're doing and pass the materials on to the next lucky individual. This game gets very competitive, very quickly. People love chocolate.

The chocolate game in full swing

La Familia Sevilla + one Sullivan

Now for Atacames:

Our trip started, like many do, with a cab ride. Being the arrogant gringos we are, the four of us decided to take the first taxi at our disposal, which happened to have exactly one of the four required symbols for a legitimate taxi. Well, as it happens, the bus terminal in Quito is deep in the south of the city (the part of the city where gringos are usually advised against visiting), and it was our cabbie's "pico placa" day. "Pico placa" is a law in Quito that makes it illegal for cars with certain numbers on their licence plates to drive on main thoroughfares during certain days of the week (this is done in an effort to reduce congestion and pollution). Suffice it to say that us four gringos got a scenic tour of all of the back roads of south Quito for a good half an hour. When our cabbie took us down a particularly sketchy street, a bit of nervous laughter spread among us gringos, to which the cabbie responded, "haha, guess I'm kidnapping you!" He proceeded to say, "hey, you look like you have a lot of money, so pass up the bags!" The four of us looked at each awkwardly for a good few seconds before the cabbie declared that he was joking. Really funny. Hilarious.

Our seven-hour bus ride featuring such cinematic gems as, "Into the Blue 2: The Reef," "Driver," and "Dragon Wars: The Final Battle" (all dubbed, in Spanish of course). We also got pulled over twice by police, who forced us to store our bags under the bus, shoved video cameras in our faces, and patted us down (makes me love my civil liberties). We caught a cab from the Esmaraldas terminal to Atacames (this cabbie was much better, though he was going 120 km in a 50km zone), and met up with our compañeros who had come the night before.

We stayed at an $8-a-night place called "Chill Inn" that featured an adorable puppy, hammocks, and nice-enough rooms.ccAt about 5:50 a.m. on Saturday, four of us in one of our rooms were awakened by the sound of a woman screaming bloody murder outside of our room. We can only speculate as to what happening, but it was very disturbing, and I don't think any of us slept particularly well for the rest of the night.

A good example of life at the "Chill Inn." This cat and I had a moment.

The next day we had a nice breakfast at the hotel and then caught a pair of moto-taxis to Sua, a beach a little further down the coast from Atacames. Ben, Julia, and Gwen decided to go whale watching, so the rest of us decided to stay on the beach and be vitamin-d absorbing vegetables for a while. For lunch, we went back to Atacames and chowed down on some mariscos and then headed back out to the beach. In the evening we made a run of the various Atacames bars, I nearly got robbed by a bunch of small children who were surrounding us with the pretext of teaching one of our friends how to dance (luckily, Alex came over and loudly announced we needed to move along). We ended our evening with a 1:30 am dip in the Pacific, and then called it a night.

The next day, the majority of our group decided to catch an earlier bus back to Quito, but Gwen, Julia, Ben, Michael, and I decided to stick around. Once out on the beach, Ben and I negotiated with some of the people working on the beach and ended up parasailing for only $35 split between the two of us. We did some bodysurfing, had some ceviche, and then decided to head back to Esmaraldas to catch a bus to Quito. As luck would have it, when we got to Esmaraldas (around 3:30), there were no busses with open spots until 11:30 pm. To kill time we went down to Las Palmas, a beach in Esmaraldas where we were certifiably the only white people. We played Yahtzee and watched the sun go down over the Pacific. After a few more hours of homework, boredom, and near-insanity, we boarded our bus back to Quito. We got to the station at 6:00 am. Needless to say, classes for the next few days were rather painful.

Right now partial exams are getting into full swing, so I'm going to be rather busy for the next few weeks. On friday I leave for Tiputini, USFQ's biodiversity research center, so I should have some interesting stories once I come back on monday night (though this means I will be missing both Ecuador's world cup qualifier against Venezuela, and the red river shootout [for the first time in my 20 years]).