Ecuador – 2014

Andrew and I had just gotten into the swing of things enjoying Peru when we decided it was time to move on before experiencing comfort. We slowly moseyed into Ecuador from Peru via Tumbes up to Machala, putting our hopes to the test. Ecuador instantly had a more laid-back feel but I couldn’t tell if that was a mental block I had lifted or if it was the enormous banana plantations that surrounded us on all sides, making life seem a little less serious. Either way, I accepted the new excitement and exhaled slowly in relief.

After we entered the country we stopped near the border by a gas station, some love motels and a small market with hundreds of bootlegged DVDs and got some gross food before boarding another bus to go to Cuenca, a supposedly badass place to retire according to all the magazines my father gets in the mail. It reminded me of a slightly less-European generic European city. In Cuenca we met up with a friend Andrew knew from Colómbia and went to Parque Nacional el Cajas with another friend who later, very intelligently broke down my personality into three words after observing that I don’t drink alcohol, pointing at my glasses and saying, “You…are…nerd.”

The girls told us about a town an hour or so away called Gualaceo with a nice traditional market and a river that ran alongside it. Gualaceo seemed like the embodiment of all these words: quaint, idyllic, sleepy, peaceful. We walked around and relaxed there for a few hours and then caught a bus and fell asleep for the trip back to Cuenca. As we walked toward town we got dinner at some shithole chifa and decided this would be our last night in Cuenca and that we would go to the coast for some sunshine and hopefully more dragonflies.

We took a bus to Guayaquil and ate in their massive and very modern bus depot, which was more like a gigantic mall. It seemed like one of the nicest places we visited in Ecuador even though most people told us it was a dangerous shithole. Maybe once you’re south of the equator everything flips and bus depots are the fanciest parts of town, unlike in the northern hemisphere where bus depots are places for homeless and sketchy people to congregate. From there we took a smaller bus to Salinas, a coastal town. Salinas was very interesting in the fact that there were nice-looking high-rise condos, restaurants, everything along the water’s edge but two blocks inland was literally dust roads and vacant unfinished buildings that had already started deteriorating.

Editor’s note: OMG…I know most of you don’t have the attention span for this. I’ll explain the rest after the photos.

We stayed in Salinas a few days; it must’ve been low season because this place totally dead. Pretty much the only person I talked to besides myself and Andrew was the guy who sold me a coconut to drink out of on the beach. And I just said thanks and smiled. We headed north to Puerto López, another beach that was in a less-developed town and not (found out the hard way) within walking distance to Parque Nacional Machalilla, despite what the map looks like. We tried…and literally walked along a desert-looking highway with vultures standing around a stray dog that had been decimated by a passing truck, blood pooling in the street. Eventually a guy came on a mototaxi and we bargained after repeatedly telling him “no” as he drove slowly alongside us.

The guy didn’t tell us there was a relatively steep entrance fee to the park, even though we had told him didn’t have enough cash for his ride, so we ended up borrowing money from a cab driver again. The park had the potential to be cool as it was extremely vast and full of different habitats, but unfortunately we had to be accompanied by a guide. This is not my style, as sometimes I just sit on the ground for three hours taking pictures of one insect. We did see some dragonflies there as well (though the predominant species, Erythemis vesiculosa, was also one that occurs at home) as a few idyllic beaches that had extremely strong tides.

After our time at the park and the surprising lack of diversity in natural life we bussed it to Quito and decided we were just going to go ahead and go to Colómbia and explore because our currency would be worth more there. Yep, this meant that somehow we had gone to Ecuador but managed to stay east of the Andes and out of the Amazon, which would probably be the most interesting place of all to me. Not really sure how this could have possibly happened but there was a lot going on at the time. I forgive myself. I’ll go back. I tell myself that every night before bed.

Hope you liked it.