Bugs (and Bugs)
Thursday, July 10th, 2008Gina. Mancora, Peru.
Beach life just isn´t my thing. We left Huanchaco a couple of days ago for another night bus farther up the coast to Mancora. Mancora is about 1 1/2 hours from the Ecuador border and an 8 hour bus trip from Huanchaco. It seemed like a good place to stop and break up the bus ride. And it´s very nice, but I´m just not into beaches. Well, they´re okay. I don´t particularly like sand (I sort of hate it) and I don´t really like salt water (it irritates my skin. I know, I´m weird). But we´ve had a pretty good time here anyway just relaxing and watching people surf (and a couple of people try to kite surf which looks terrifying). We were going to try to take a surf lesson here, but the water isn´t that warm and while it´s pretty humid it´s also really windy on the beach so chilly. Since we´re heading farther up the coast to Ecuador anyway, we decided just to wait for warmer water and weather to try to get out there.
We had a nice last day in Huanchaco. We tried cebiche at this fancy restaurant that overlooked the ocean. It was pretty tasty–you could really taste the lime. And the raw fish texture was nice. We also got a plate that had a giant piece of lightly breaded fish and a pile of mixed deep fried shellfish. It was damn tasty. We even got to eat some baby octopus which was nothing like I thought it would be. I was expecting it to be chewy, but it really tender. It was a very nice lunch. I like eating seafood while looking at the ocean.
The bus ride was uneventful. I slept, Steve watched a cheesey movie in Spanish. We arrived in Mancora at 6 in the morning. It was dark. I was sleepy and grumpy and we didn´t know where we were going since we´d forgotton to write down possible Mancora hostels. But our taxi driver (Taxi! It was really a motorbike with a little back seat shell thing around it… it´s hard to explain) was very nice and patient and took us to three different places before we picked one. The first place was really cheep but also really grungy. The sink and bathtub were full of giant crickets. The second place was way more than we wanted to spend, but the first place was more our style. It was close enough to walk to the beach and was pretty clean. It´s very humid here so there are a lot of bugs. Our room had ants and our bed was a 24-hour buffet for some termites, there was mouse evidence in our room (and the teenager who ran the place–I guess–had seen a mouse and set traps recently) , and we had a nice lizard friend in our room (who was very welcome since they eat bugs), but whatever. I´m surprised all of our rooms haven´t been crawling in bugs since they´ve been so cheap. We´ve really only seen one or two other insects the whole trip (a spider and a giant, giant bee), but I´m sure the time for bugs has come since we´re planning on staying near the coast and just getting closer and closer to the ecuator all of the time
There were some pretty noisy Brits staying in our hostel as well (I think the walls were literally made of paper) who had some horror stories to tell. Two of them had all of their stuff stolen right in front of them while they were in Bolivia. They had just gotten into the mountains and put down their bags when they were snatched. I guess they made chase but the altitude is so hard on you that they didn´t have a chance. If someone would´ve grabbed our bags when we first got to Cusco they would be long gone–even though Steve ran track in college. Another couple had left Mancora the night before but instead of getting on their bus to Quito (North in Ecuador) they accidentally got on a bus to Lima (South)! They got all the way to Lima, and turned around and bought a ticket back to Mancora! Poor guys. I think the horror stories both made me feel bad for the poor suckers and also relieved that we´ve had very good luck. But really I think we´re just more careful in a lot of ways. These group of kids, specifically, were a bit crazy (a prime example is that we could hear them doing coke last night through the paper walls. Doing cocaine (period) let alone buying it in Peru is, in my opinion, completely nutso). Which doesn´t mean that you can´t be completely diligent and very careful and not get stuff stolen. It happens. I´m just glad we have all of our stuff still, except for a couple of little things that we lost on our own.
So off to Ecuador where we´ll catch another bus to Puerto Lopez which is on the coast and is the launching point for a National Park that has mangrove forests, whale watching, and an island with blue-footed boobies (boobies!). I´m very excited. We´re planning on staying there a few days before going up to Bahia de Caraquez where Steve is going to volunteer with an organization called Planet Drum and where I am going to look for somewhere to volunteer. They´re graciously going to allow me to stay with Steve in their volunteer apartment and help me find something else as they´re doing reforestation of a hillside, which means carrying buckets of water up hills all day, and that´s not really up my alley. I´m glad this is working out as it´s been pretty tough finding places to volunteer that we were both interested in and that didn´t cost a huge amount of money (this one is something like $15 a month a piece for food). So we can save money, do some good work, maybe take Spanish lessons, and still have weekends free to explore.