How I Became a Sea Cucumber Poacher

Well devoted readers, after a third of Ecuador, 10 buses, 2 beaches, a resemblance of a tan (or more appropriately, a migration of tan lines), a full-body suit of mosquito bites, tidal pool fishing, hiking, fiestaing, eating/drinking/sleeping in general, and a little baby puke, I have returned to Quito and an internet connection capable of accomodating blog updates. Today I concluded a 10 day vacation with a 10 hour bus ride (love the symmetry) from Cuenca back to Quito. The whole day on the bus I felt really excited to be returning to Quito, even though the vacation was great and I could have stayed longer. I´ve been referring to Quito as ¨home¨for months but after my longest stint away from the city, I really started to miss my family, apartment, bed, internship, kids, and familiarity. It was a nice realization to stumble upon.

I also just realized that I began my blog-hiatus about a week before I actually left for vacation...woops. The only real event worth notice during that week was a trip with my co-workers back to Mindo. Originally I thought we were going with a group of our kids but when I got there I realized it was just a volunteer/employee outing. It was pretty fun (it´s hard to make a natural waterslide with a 10 foot drop at the end unfun) but it was definitely different than I was expecting. For starters, I spent the whole day with my bosses, who I adore, but who grilled me on what I thought of the foundation and what suggestions I had. It was fun to hang out with the other volunteers without the kids but they spoke in French a lot of the time. All in all it was a worthwhile trip but not as exciting as I´d hoped. I posted some pictures of the trip (and the vacation) along with some pictures from stilts 2 Wednesdays ago.

Now back to the vacation...last Friday night I left Quito again for the beach town of Canoa with five other people on my program (Anna, Kristin, Emma, Jon, and Kiersten). The stay was more or less the same as last time only with better weather. We ate our breakfasts at the same little restaurant (which had the best pancakes I´ve ever eaten) and actually stayed in the same hostel (although the cornucopia of hammocks had been removed, grumbles all around). Other than that, Canoa consisted entirely of beach time, shrimp ceviche (a cold, seafood soup/my favorite Ecuadorian food), and more Pilsener (Ecuadorian beer). On the topic of Ecuadorian beer, there are two main labels, Brahma and Pilsener. Pilsener is more common but Brahma is better and the last time we visited Canoa Brahma was practically flowing in the streets. This visit however there was no Brahma to be found. When I asked for Brahma from a vender on the beach, she actually went to far as to say, "What do you think we are, Quito?"...quite baffling. After a beach bonfire and an extremely enjoyable time, leaving Canoa ended up a little more complicated than intended or was necessary...

We had bus tickets for 8:00 in the morning, which shouldn´t have been too difficult to make, but we had trouble finding our bus/boat to the bus station in Bahía a half hour away and arrived 10 minutes late. We then bought our second ticket for an hour later and as we were eating breakfast by the road a bus pulled by and the man yelled at us, "Jipijapa?! Ven, rapido, rapido!" It wasn´t quite the time on our tickets yet but we were going to Jipijapa (pronounced "hippy hoppa," the name is really the only fun thing about the town) and having suffered under a sporadic Ecuadorian bus schedule before, we didn´t question. When we showed the man our tickets a good hour into the trip, he told us we had tickets for a different bus company. Although I yelled at him for a good 10 minutes that he was the one who told us to get on the bus, he insisted it wasn´t his fault (which it wasn´t, not entirely anyway) and we bought our 3rd round of tickets to Jipijapa.

The trip went smoothly after that and we arrived in Montañita that afternoon. Montañita is one of the best beaches in Ecuador (it´s actually home to an international surfing competition in March) but also one of the more touristy. Unfortunately, neither of these descriptions ended up affecting us much because it rained the two days we were there. This didn´t entirely stop us from having a good time and we enjoyed the rainy beach and the cool tidal pools. One morning Anna and I were walking down the beach and ran into a bunch of people walking around in the tidal pools. After inquiring we learned they were hunting for oysters, squid, octupi, and most interestingly, sea cucumbers. I have a vague notion that sea cucumber hunting is illegal, but the two men assured us that it´s legal one day a month (this being that day) so we joined in. We spent about a half hour lifting up mossy rocks to reveal the fat sea cucumbers (or, pepinos del mar) underneath. They were really disgusting and enthusiastically employed their only means of self-defense: squirting water out of both ends. The sea cucumber trade is actually really interesting. They aren´t really eaten in South America, but are caught in Ecuador, shipped to Peru for processing, and finally sent to China and Southeast Asia where they are considered a delicacy. I´m pretty sure I learned this in a documentary about the awful/incredibly illegal trade in shark fins (also caught off Ecuador and sent to China for shark fin soup) and I seem to recall the sea cucumber trade being portrayed in the same light...oh well...

The big waves of Montañita come from a rocky point that juts out at the end of the beach. I was feeling adventurous and started around the point to see what was on the other side. The tide was coming up and I felt a little like that guy in every Baywatch episode who ventures out onto the rocks only to be swept into the sea (there is no Ecuadorian David Hasselhoff by the way) but when I got around the point I found that the entire rock was covered in fresh flower petals and little candle altars. I´m not sure who put them there or why and didn´t take my camera because I was fairly certain I would fall into the ocean, but it was an impressive sight.

After two days of rainy lounging in Montañita, we left for the last leg of the trip in Cuenca. Cuenca is the third largest city in Ecuador (we stopped at the bus station in Guayaquil, the largest city, and live in Quito, #2) and the hometown of our director and professor, Martha.

An update on what´s happening RIGHT NOW: We´re watching a ridiculous Latin American reality dance competition (they play the couples´national anthem before they dance so we´ve been laughing for about a half hour now) and Juan Carlos is salsaing around the living room. He´s been really sick for a week and everytime he wants to eat something, Charo takes it away and scolds him. He responds by sneaking food from my plate and moping. Today´s the first day he´s felt better so we´re all cheering on the dancing. Back to the trip...

Every Ecuadorian city has their own Independence Day fiesta (you could probably hit a different 4th of July-style party every week, pretty cool) and we made sure to be in Cuenca for their fiesta. We´d been to a town fiesta in a smaller town before and the big city version was much more subdued and cosmopolitan. In Guapalo we lit things on fire, drank in the streets, and danced in the plaza. In Cuenca, professionals lit things on fire, business types went to clubs, and we went to bed. Cuenca was a really beautiful city though, we spent one day just visiting churches and napping on the bank of the river that bisects the city. Cuenca seemed much more cosmopolitan to us than Quito and at several points it felt more like Europe than South America. There were trees blooming purple flowers all over the city and the weather was more or less perfect.

The second day in Cuenca we went to a national park an hour away called Parque Nacional Cajas. The park was full of enormous rock formations and glacial lakes. It was really beautiful and it was fun to be away from civilization for a while. We hiked around for about 4 hours and headed back to Cuenca.

Yesterday morning we boarded our tenth and last bus and returned to Quito. Prior to this bus we´d been taking night buses to save time but a day bus was a great way to see the country. After this trip I can tell you with complete confidence that every inch of Ecuador is amazingly beautiful. Our 10 hour ride flew by as we passed indigenous villages, colonial cities, mountains covered in farming terraces, and more snow-capped volcanoes (including Cotopaxi, the world´s tallest active volcano) than you could hope for. I´ll definitely be returning to several of the places we passed. One downside of the trip was when the little girl I was holding on my lap (buses are always filled to overcapacity) threw up. Luckily she aimed for the aisle and we had a bag ready but monitoring the possibility of future throwup helped keep me awake for a few hours.

I posted some more pictures, I was kind of picture lazy on this trip but I think other people took some good ones. My friend who I´ve been counting on for a CD of really good pictures later had her camera stolen in the bus station (huge bummer, but the first theft on the program). Sorry I hadn´t written in so long, I feel pretty rejuvinated after my vacation so hopefully I´ll get back in the groove of things. Hope everyone´s well!

Coming soon: Chota