Hola from Ecuador!
Gina. Puerto Lopez, Ecuador.
We arrived in Ecuador yesterday morning after taking a night bus from Mancora, Peru to Guayaquil, Ecuador. We arrived in Guayaquil at around 5:00 in the morning after getting off the bus 3 times for the border crossing (the bus company was CIFA and for 47 soles each we got bed seats (which were quite comfortable) on the first floor of the bus (which is nicer and less crowded) and they stopped on both sides of the border and waited while everyone got their passports stamped and got their Ecuador travel visa documents. It was a pretty nice bus service and from what I´ve heard about other services where you´re on your own for the crossing (including getting a taxi and possibly getting robbed or worse) worth the money and being woken up in the wee hours to stand in line. My first impressions of Ecuador are all positive. Everyone is very friendly, the bus terminal in Guayaquil was clean, had informative signs telling you where to go for buses to different regions of Ecuador and signs for the bathroom and restaurants (none of the bus terminals in Peru we went to were nearly as clean and well laid out as Guayaquil). It was nicer than a lot of airports I´ve been to in the states. A security guard saw us looking at the poster about buses to different regions and came and asked us where we were trying to go and walked with us to the correct bus company! It was nice and surprising. I´ve gotten so used to being on my guard when anyone approaches me and immediately saying ¨no, gracias¨(sometimes over and over again and having to get rude before the person will leave) while in Peru. I think we were only approached maybe twice in Peru by people who just wanted to practice their English and be friendly, and that was out of probably hundreds of encounters of people trying to sell us something or get us to come to their restaurant.
We took the bus from Guayaquil to JipiJappa (funny name, sad little dusty place) where we changed buses for Puerto Lopez. Both buses cost a total of $3 each! It´s fun being in dollars again, but sort of strange. They use U.S. bills and a mixture of U.S. and Ecuadorian change (the Ecuadorian change is worth the same as the U.S. kind) which is all still silver in col0r and about the same sizes but a lot thinner and lighter. Sacagawea dollar coins are very popular here (which is funny since people don´t seem to like them in the States) as are 50 cent pieces. It´s going to take me a few days, I think, to switch over my head to our daily budget in dollars instead of soles. We´re paying $12/night for our room right now and it seems so very cheap since we were paying about 30 soles/night before. But they end up being about the same amount!
To add to my tummy fun, yesterday I felt just awful. We decided to go to the doctor again, but this time to get a stool test (we read in our Ecuador book that this is the best way to definitely know what bug you have and so you treat it correctly. If only I would´ve known this in Peru!). The doctor and lab technician were very nice but spoke no English, so it was an interesting back and forth with Steve using the phrase book and the doctors speaking slowly and making (sometimes embarassing) hand motions. But we got it all figured out, and after a blood test (we took a lot of time explaining that I was nervous about the needle being new and clean and they went out of their way to prove that it was) and a stool test (which is another whole embarassing tale that I´m just not going to go into here) we found out that I have a not so friendly tropical parasite that burrows into your intestines and sucks your blood, which in turn has caused a massive bacterial infection. So, now I´m on 5 different kinds of medication (on top of the antimalaria pills we have to take once a day since we´re now officially in mosquito land–and I hate the little boogers. Hate, hate, hate them). I take 4 pills in the morning, 1 at lunch, and 5 at dinner. But I´ll be done with all but the antibiotics in 4 days (the antibiotics will take 7). So hopefully this will kill the stupid suckers and I´ll get all better and won´t have any more bad stomach issues for a while. Especially since we´ll be in Bahia where we´ll be staying in a shared apartment and cooking all of our meals (or at least most of them) so will hopefully have less of a chance of me getting reaffected.
Right now we´re trying to plan what we want to do for tomorrow. We got approached on the street by a very nice man who with another man runs a tour company. They´re sort of a small operation but they have lots of books of praise from people who went on boat trips with them and a listing in a French tour book that they had on hand. They seem like a nicer option than the other big companies around which all seem very impersonal and few of them speak English so it´s hard to get an idea of what the trip is like. We´re going to meet back up with them at 7:30 tonight to see if another group of 6 Chilean 20-somethings have decided to book a tour with them tomorrow because if they have a big group they will charge less and have more time to explore around, snorkel, and in general do more. So, we´ll see. They don´t go to Isla de la Plata which we wanted to do, but it´s more like a whale watching trip with snorkeling. They did recommend a company that goes to Isla de la Plata and we went and talked to them, too. So now we have to make a decision. The other company had a man who spoke English and they also do scuba diving lessons and certification. We got to talking to them about that, and now we´re thinking about maybe getting certified. It costs $450 each for 4 days of training and diving (2 days in a pool and 2 days in the ocean). But if we can get 3 other people to do it with us we would get a 20% discount. We´re only a couple of hours from Bahia, so we could try to get a group together there (or through SAE) and then come down some time over the next month for the certification. It would be awesome to be certified because then we could dive in Thailand and all over SE Asia (and Australia if we decide to go there). So, it´d be a big cost but we could potentially get a lot of use out of it. Lots of decisions to be made. I think knowing that we´re going to be living somewhere for a month for really cheap is making us rethink our budget and what we want to do. Potentially we can save a lot of money volunteering for a month in each place we visit and then have that saved money to do something really awesome that we couldn´t do normally on our tight budget.
But Ecuador is really nice. Even though I´m hot (it´s very humid here) and there are lots of bugs and lots of mosquitos, everyone is so friendly and I´m slowly starting to stop my immediate dismissal of people when they approach. I´m still keeping my guard up, but I´m giving people the benefit of the doubt that maybe they´re just trying to be friendly or help. And if it looks fishy or unsafe, we can still walk away. But in general we´re no longer getting beeped at by taxis everywhere we go and no one has tried to show us their menu or try to get us to get a massage. Big pluses.
Tags: Ecuador, Puerto Lopez
montarsig
Leave a Reply