La Playa Pt. Uno

7/15/2011
11:30 Pm- Going to the bus station to get on our bus to the beach, it will be a total of 9 hours (6 + 3).

7/16/2011
6:30am- Was the worst bus ride of my life. I have a sore throat, the bus was hot and humid. I couldn't sleep also because I was worried we were going to get robbed. (it happens frequently on night buses around Guayaquil). But we made it safe to the bus station and now we board our bus to the Beach in a couple hours! I had McDonalds!!! Chicken nuggets, fries and a coke for breakfast....mmm....delicious!
9:30am- Bus left for beach!
12:30pm-BEACH!!!! SUN!!!! GRINGOS!!!! CERVEZA!!!!!


It was amazing to be at the beach and feel the sun on my skin for longer than 20 minutes at a time between passing clouds! The music was awesome and blaring all up and down the beach with little coctele stands and cerveza being served! I got a little red but not too bad, spent about 2 hours out in the ocean and swallowed a bunch of water. We walked around at night and explored the little touristy town with all the extranjeros. I met a couple from Savanna, GA the guy was an aircraft repairman for the best army in the world for 6 years and the couple both attended GSU (georgia southern univ.) and had just finished a 4-week long anthropology program and had decided to go to the beach like us. They were nice to chat with, we spoke to them for about 2 hours. Then when we were eating dinner we met this guy from Boston who was studying Business in Cuenca, he had two black eyes and we never had enough courage to bring up the topic haha. But he was nice and cool to talk to, he knew that Idaho was the potato state! Wooo ID! We went out for a little bit and drank some beers and then walked along the beach and caught sand dollars!!! That was pretty awesome haha!

7/17/2011
We slept in a little bit it was nice to sleep with the sound of the ocean in the background and not car alarms or buses honking for once!! We went and ate at this little restaurant and had pancakes, eggs, and toast for breakfast. It was delicious the pancakes were more like crepes but hey they were good! They had jelly with them. Today was a fairly overcast day but atleast we had the sun the day before! We lounged on the beach just to be at the beach and played in the ocean a little more because the water is really warm here even without the sun, I mean it is the equator! We are actually spending another night in the hostel because it´s cheap, on the ocean and we can leave for our "poor man galapagos" tour from here in the morning! We enjoyed more sun and skipped dinner with some ice cream and eventually ended up getting a pizza later. It has been fun here in Montañita doing kind of the touristy thing can´t wait for the tour tomorrow!

7/18/2011
Woke up early and had my bag packed so I walked downtown to try and find a breakfast place that was open at 7:30am in paradise! haha there wasn´t anyplace opens the streets had a few people starting to open tour shops and little tiendas with the basics. I finally stumbled across a group of ecuadoreans sitting at a couple plastic tables eating and asked if they had desayuno (breakfast) and they were delighted to share their delicacies with me they had this delicious fish soup with yuca in it (the fish was albacoa?? not really sure) and chifles (banana chips with seasoning) and you put them in the soup like saltines. I must say it doesnt sound too appetizing for breakfast but man was it delicous. So after that I went back to the hostel met up with the others and we headed for our tour. About 40 minutes later we arrived in Puerto Lopez and began walking down the beach to the boats. All the boats were on the beach!?!? they don´t believe in docks here i guess. So our boat was actually already in the water and they kind of pushed it to the shore and we waded through a little bit of water and boarded. There were 15 of us plus 3 crew members on this little 20-25ft boat. Not much room to move around they had us lined up on the bench along either side of the boat and we were ready to take off!

So I sat next to Eric on one side and this british guy on the other he was quite interesting. Used to be a Software analyst for some well known bank in England that merged with one in the U.S. (Lloyd banks??) anyways he was quite the character and a blast to sit next to and talk with on the way out. He had been travelling all of Sur America and had 6 weeks left before going back to Europe. He´d make small british jokes and laugh and I would more or less laugh at him or the craziness of the sound of the jokes haha. Also there was a Swedish family, a Finnish couple?? (i think they were finnish), and a spanish speaking family. I later talked to the father of the Swedish family and he is a professor at a university in some sort of engineering I didn´t quite catch it because of his accent but he´s got a Doctorate student working for google in California and that is where they had just come from! Also I told him I was from Idaho and he said that he´s actually been to Boyss (Boise) haha and took a rafting trip on the snake river! I thought that was pretty cool!! He said he really loved the area and the trip, it was all beautiful. The only thing he said was that he got on this little tinker of an airplane form Boise to the trip and it had TWO WHEELS IN FRONT AND ONE BEHIND!!! haha it astonished him, he thought it was from the 40´s or 50´s, it cracked me up!

Back to the trip, on our way out to the island which is 42km off the coast we got to do some whale watching! we came across a....heard?...of 3 whales all flipping their tails out of the water and what not it was pretty cool! Then it was onto the island, we got there and saw tonsss of birds immediately pulling up it was crazy! We got out and started the "long" 600m walk to the beginning of the trail.

Stop. Think of the galapagos or a tropical island what do you see. Green trees. Birds. Ocean. Cliffs. Tom Hanks. Wilson. Swiss family robinson. Anyways wrong this is a tropical dry forest here at Isla de la Plata meaning there is very little green but it was still enough to make it beautiful! We saw tiny blue flowers in the lower shrubbery and the trees grew over the trail giving us some shade because this far out from the mainland there weren´t many clouds! My feet even got burnt i found out later that night and i even put sunscreen on them!! We got to the point to decide where the trail split into 2 different tours and there was a Piquero pato azules (Blue footed boobies) pair right there!! Holy cow it was incredible!!! The male was doing a little dance and making this whistling sound and the female was "grunting" back. Quite an incredible experience to physically watch!! We took pictures and moved on to let them be and about  50m down the trail there was another pair!!! WOW! they´re everywhere! It kept going like this until we got too a different part of the island a couple hundred meters down the trail. THEN we got to see these huge beautiful birds called Fragata and the males are the ones with the red "balloons" on their chest that they puff up and make this gargling noise to impress the females! and there´s just tons and ton´s of them in one tree all doing this i will post pictures soon!!

Next we got to head back out onto the boat for lunch, sea turtles and snorkeling! and during lunch we got 2 of those things done at once! We were sitting there and all of a sudden TWO sea turtles surfaced around the boat just checking us out to see what we were and then after that a Third one showed up! they were pretty big too! So after that we got to jump into the water and go snorkeling, now I may be spoiled because I got to go snorkeling in Hawaii (thanks mom and dad!) but the "reefs" here were a little different it´s actually brinestone rock. I saw a huge group of Parrott fish and followed them around for a bit, also saw some clown fish, an unidentified that looked like a tiny shark, some starfish, and other little fish! It was nice to be out in the ocean swimming with the sun on my back. After a while I got out and went back on board the boat and did a little tanning and just took it all in thinking about how lucky I was to see these rare species and have this experience! It´s quite amazing indeed!

After snorkeling we headed back to Puerto Lopez and attempted to do a little more whale watching but the whales weren´t as friendly we came across about another 4-5 more but as soon as we got close they just dived off. Oh well we had the one good show with three of them so I was satisfied and it felt good to have a little ocean spray in the face!

Well I feel like this is a really long one so im going to write a second article to break it up! Sorry for the long windedness and detail I´m also using this to help me remember everything or as much as possible anyways! Will post pictures soon!!!!!!