Hanging out at the Beach

Following the excitement of the jungle we decided to head to beach to recover. Kirsty had found a nature reserve on the coast run by a Canadian woman. So we packed up our camping gear and bought tickets for another night bus. The journey was fairly typical in that somewhere on a roadside in the middle of nowhere we were stopped at an army checkpoint. Usually they come on-board and make all the Ecuadorian men get off to have their documents searched. Gringos and children it seems do not pose the same level of threat and therefore warrant no more that a cursory glance at our passports.  This time was different, we escorted off the bus and separated - I was instructed to place my hands on the side of the bus and frisked, after which we were both sent to the checkpoint office to present our passports. After some closer examination of our passports and questioning about whether Kirsty was my sister? - the obvious conclusion to draw given our passports bear the same name.

Back on the bus, the sky grew lighter with the advent of dawn and we began to make out the resorts which dotted the coast road into Atacambes. The bus slowed as people disembarked and closer glimpses of the "resorts" made us grateful that we were camping in a nature reserve.

Ever the intrepid travelers we decides that instead of getting a taxi for the final leg from the bus station, we would use the local buses.  This led to a couple of hours stood at the bus stop failing to spot the bus promised by the timetable. After the bus failed to show we started asking all the buses whether they were going in our direction.  Eventually after much gesticulation we were dropped at the end of the road by a bus driver who them gave the woman at the juice shack instructions to put us on the next bus to our destination.  People in Ecuador are very kind in this respect and always endeavor to be helpful.  We've been herded onto countless buses and accompanied by members of the public with instructions to tell us when to get off or where to make our connection.  Usually this seems to work out - when it doesn’t, you get the trip we had to the Equator.

We were eventually dropped off down at the waterfront beside a large thatched two storey hut.  The hut was open on all sides and we could see through it to the beach and the water beyond.  Apart from some local staff, the place was deserted and we were able to camp right in the trees next to the beach.  The land was lightly forested and divided between camping pitches and a handful of large thatched huts situated on the hills either side of the beach.

The main hut contained a small restaurant which we ate in most nights.  In the evenings we were joined by the Canadian owner (Judy) and an American couple who had been living and working there for the last 3 months. Judy had bought about 100 hectares of coastal forest about 20 years ago and beyond the handful of buildings, done very little to development it beyond clearing the campsites.  The beach itself was sandy to the shoreline, but as the tide went it was clear that beyond a small finger of sand, the rest of the sea bed beyond was rocky.

We spent the first day swinging in the beach side hammocks reading our books.  The sky cloudy but the the weather was hot.  We soon settled into a lazy routine, getting up late and cooking breakfast and lunch over an open fire sat in broken plastic chairs like hillbillies, dozing and reading in the hammocks in between, before rousing our selves to body surf the waves of the afternoon incoming tide.  Followed by dinner, a cold beer and game of chess in restaurant hut.  Wild party animals that we were,  we were in bed most nights by 8pm.

This routine was only punctuated by a walk down to Same during low tide and brief stroll through the rocky shoreline the other side of our beach.  During our stay we were joined for a day or two by a couple of other travellers, who seemed not to know that the beach side hammocks were ours!  On the second to last day of our stay a Chilean and Dutch couple set up a slack-line, which is essentially a tensioned tightrope, set at about a metre off the ground.  Seeing as they had cool tool instead of glowering at them as we had when other guests had approached the hammocks, we made the effort to be friendly as a pretext for having a go on the slack-line.  They were friendly and we were soon chatting and balancing on the line, which was great until Kirsty hefferlumped off the slackline and crushed one of our high end plastic hillbilly chairs.  The chair cost $10 and that was the end of slack-lining.

 

We left the campsite the next day and hitched a lift back towards the main town with a couple of the local in a huge cattle truck.  Less in it, more on it - the truck bed had wooden sides about 12 feet high and single plank strapped across the gap in between - which is where we sat,  ducking overhanging and clinging on for dear life, as the driver took the racing line.