Wanderlust

Gina. Puerto Lopez, Ecuador.

Yesterday was a bad day. Things started out nicely on Saturday night. We met a bunch of people at all hostel from all over the world (Spain, Holland, Switzerland, and Australia) and everyone was nice and talkative and we had fun talking about places we´ve been in S. America, future plans, and just chatting. We also learned to play a fun Israeli game called Yaneev (no idea how to spell that) which I was ridiculously bad at. We stayed up late and had plans to get up in the morning and take a boat ride to see blue-footed boobies, whales, and go snorkeling.

But then things went downhill. Neither of us could sleep–it was hot and we had spent a good portion of the evening drinking Argentinian tea with a Dutch guy named Steve who was sort of the center of the gathering. In retrospect I never should have drank any of the tea since I don´t ever really consume caffeine and who knows how much it had in it. And then at some point in the wee hours of the morning I got sick. It turns out that my pharmacy of medication I have to take for the parasite and the bacterial infection all have nausea and vomiting as the first two possible side effects. I spent most of the night feeling nauseous and the rest of the night vomiting. No fun at all. At some point Steve shifted in his sleep and I felt violently ill and I realized there was no way I was going to get on a boat in a couple of hours. I decided that Steve should try to get our money back or reschedule for the next day and if he couldn´t he should go since it´d suck to be out $40.

He ended up getting $15 back for me (which was fine since originally they were going to charge us $25 each but went down to $20) and went on his own. I spent the day sleeping, eating very bland crackers (more bland than Saltines if you can believe it, and they were perfect for my upset stomach), and still taking my stupid medicine every 8 hours. Thankfully I didn´t get sick any more after the night, but I had no energy and felt like crap.

Steve had an adventure of his own. There were supposed to be 4 other people going with Wiston Churchill on his boat. 3 others didn´t show up, so it was just Steve and some other guy. Because they wouldn´t make enough money to cover costs by taking out only two people, they found another tour boat about to leave that would take Steve and the other dude. Why they didn´t just give Steve back his money or try to reschedule us for the next day, I´ll never understand. There were three things that they promised us for the trip: whale watching, snorkeling, and seeing the birds. Their big pitch was that unlike other tour companies that just go out looking for whales and come back as soon as they see them, they liked to tailor to their customers and do more things and have a good time. We were really more interested in the birds and the snorkeling and that´s why we decided to go with them. Steve saw some whales, which was exciting, but that was it. He went out on a boat (where he got seasick, poor thing. We thought he might be susceptible since when we were in Baha, Mexico he got sea sick on a fishing trip but that was after a night of margaritas so we weren´t positive it was the boat that made him sick) and did not get to snorkel which was the only reason he wanted to go, really. The guys just made a really poor business decision. We liked them, we were excited about going with them, and then they pushed Steve off on someone else (who I´m sure they gave his $25 to) and so they made no money and disappointed their customer. How sad.

So, yesterday was a bad day. Steve had no fun. I had no fun. We spent the rest of the day lounging and reading and napping. Today was nicer but still really relaxed. We walked along the beach and then had a late lunch and another nap. I´m still not feeling great, but after tomorrow at lunch I´ll only have the antibiotics left (until Friday). I´m looking forward to no more parasites and no more pills. We´re going to Bahia de Caraquez tomorrow where we´ll hopefully settle down in a nice apartment for a month and start volunteering and unpack our bags for a while.

I think I´m going to come back to Puerto Lopez some weekend over the next month on my own or maybe with a volunteering friend and go to Isla de la Plata. I want to see the boobies, damn it, and take funny pictures of them. Steve isn´t going to risk the 3 hours round trip boat ride, so I´m on my own unless I can find a buddy. But that´s fine since it costs $55 to go ($15 for the island day park pass and $40 for the boat/guide–although I think we get a 10% discount with Machalilla tours with our SAE card) and it´s really for me anyway.

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.