Life at Planet Drum
Gina. Bahia, Ecuador
It’s been almost two weeks since we arrived in Bahia, and I’ve grown really fond of this town. It’s just an all-around pleasant place to be. People are friendly—saying hello and how are you as you walk down the street; the food is cheap—bananas cost $0.3 a piece, a set lunch with juice, choice of soup, and choice of meat $1.50, a loaf of fresh baked bread $0.75; and the weather is pleasant. Bahia is located on a very tiny peninsula (it’s about 4 blocks wide at the tip) with the Pacific Ocean on one side and the Rio Chone on the other. The river is home to mangrove reforestation projects, shrimp farms (including the world’s only certified organic shrimp farm), and a giant frigate bird colony as well as lots of other bird species. Just a short boat and bus ride away is the beautiful, sandy beach town of Canoa where there’s good surfing and lots of beachfront bars. Bahia has a couple of small beaches that are nice to sit around and have lunch or relax, but the real beach life is in Canoa which is fine by me… it means less tourists, less crime, and less noisy nightlife.
Planet Drum is nicely situated in the center of town, just a block away from the daily market that serves all of our produce needs (as well as seafood and meat). We splurged Sunday and bought an entire chicken for $5. It was very good which is a relief because buying chicken that’s just sitting on a table seemed a little scary at first, but it didn’t smell funny or look weird, so all was well. Every morning I have a giant bowl of fruit (pineapple, cantaloupe, kiwis, and bananas) with strawberry yogurt (the yogurt here is more liquidy than at home, which I actually like better). And usually Steve buys a warm loaf of bread from the bakery two houses down.
Originally I wasn’t going to help out with Planet Drum, but it turns out that there’s not much for me to do around Bahia. There are various volunteer opportunities (including Rio Muchacho Organic Farm which I want to go visit some time soon) but nothing that’s cheap and where I could still stay in the Planet Drum apartment with Steve. So we’ve worked it out where I come along to the sites they’re watering that day and work on mapping them and trying to record where there are dead plants or where stakes are missing. I’m also taking photos of the different trees they plant in order to try to put together some sort of tree identification packet, and I help out in the green house with watering, making dirt, replanting saplings, and weeding. It’s been pretty fun, actually. We only work half days—from 8 until noon, 5 days a week—so Steve and I have the afternoons and weekends to do our own thing which, unfortunately, is proving a little difficult since Bahia is a very long bus ride (or 3) from most everything else of interest. I think next weekend I’m going to go back to Puerto Lopez to do the Isla de la Plata trip and finally see the boobies! Steve might come with me for the weekend just for company, but his poor stomach won’t make the 1 ½ boat ride to the island.
We’re spending our free time looking into what we want to do once we leave here (our planned departure date is August 13th). We have to be back in Lima for our September 2nd plane back to the States, so we need to plan our last touristy adventures carefully so that we’ll be back in time. We’re especially looking into jungle adventure tours to the rainforest—something that’s been a must for us and this trip. We found a few promising looking tour operators, so hopefully we’ll have that all booked and ready to soon. We’ve also started looking into volunteer opportunities for China. It seems really early to do this, but I think we’re realizing more and more that China is going to be difficult to get around in with no knowledge of Mandarin or how to read Chinese symbols, so we think it’d be a good idea to line up a one month volunteering opportunity for right when we arrive so that we can take some Mandarin courses and get to know Chinese customs a little bit before heading off on our own. But it’s been really hard so far to find anything that doesn’t cost loads of money. It boggles my mind that they cost so much. Something like the panda reserve opportunities I understand since you get to play with pandas, so it’s more like a touristy thing than grunt labor, but paying $2,000 to volunteer as an English teacher is insane! Insane! I just don’t get it. But we’re going to try putting feelers out on some of the travel websites (like Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree Forum and Bootsnall) to see if anyone can recommend opportunities that are more in our budget (how about free like Planet Drum!).
I’m not sure if I ever actually explained what Planet Drum does (and I’m really only finding out piecemeal myself). The facts: They’re a San Francisco based organization whose project in Bahia is based around reforesting the hillsides where El Nino flooding and then a massive earthquake caused mudslide and severe damage to the hills, river, and the community. They’ve acquired various tracts of land (I’m fuzzy on whether they own them or if the owners are just letting them reforest the land… I know there are contracts about people not cutting down the trees, so maybe it’s the latter) and they plant native trees before the rainy season (winter—which even though we’re still technically South of the ecuator, they’re on the same summer/winter schedule as the Northern Hemisphere, so yay for being back in summer!) and water them during the dry season (what we’re doing). They also own a green house where they plant seeds they’ve collected and nurture the baby trees until it’s planting time again. Somewhere in there they look for new sites and they also run an ecological school program where kids sign up for 4 hours of ecological courses a week per school term (I think they have 3 terms a year, so 2 small breaks instead of one big summer break) including field trips and nutritional information.
Since the devastation after the earthquake Bahia has tried to rebuild itself as an Eco-city. They have become a model of sustainability with the city-wide recycling and composting programs, the replanting the mangroves and the hillsides, organic farms, and eco-tourism programs. After seeing Peru and a little of the Ecuadorian coast, it really is remarkable just how clean the streets, air, and beaches are in and around Bahia. Walking on the beach was an olfactory nightmare in Puerto Lopez—trash and dead fish from the fishermen was everywhere on the beaches and in the streets.
I like it here. There are still lots of mosquitoes (I have the bumps on my feet to prove it. They love my feet.) and it’s painfully hot sometimes, but if I was more diligent with the bug spray the mosquitoes wouldn’t bother me as much and you can walk 5 blocks to the ocean during the hottest time of day and get an amazing breeze so you barely notice the heat. It’s a nice place. A good vacation from our vacation and a chance to get to know the people of Ecuador a little bit better.
Tags: Bahia de Caraquez, Ecuador, Planet Drum
montarsig
WOW I cannot believe that your 3 months is almost up. I wish you would stop eating the fruit…you should know better!!! I miss our late night chats…you should really let a girl know when you are not going to blog…I was getting worried then I remembered to check the pictures which I saw yesterday that you had posted so I knew you were ok….at least on the 23rd and 24th!! Love you.
I love that you´re now officially ¨Not Cara.¨ You can always email me… I´m usually online every few days. And we still have a month left… so it´s not almost up yet! A month is a long time. I can´t believe it´s almost your birthday!