Impromptu trip to the Pacific

My first day at La Hesperia didn’t really count.

I got up super early in order to take the first bus out of Quito and then spent the next two hours staring out the window at the changing landscape. First I saw Quito, which felt strange to me, because it smelled like Mexico but looked like India. I had trouble wrapping my mind around that, how every brightly painted garage door and every box-like, multi-storeyed, and equally colorful house brought back visions of remote towns in the Himalayas. I don’t know if the architecture is characteristic of the altitude, the climate, or the socio-economic level, but there are strange similarities.

Once I left the city, I saw the farmland, which looked like a picturesque Vermont landscape stretched out onto steep mountains. Even the cows were the same, except here, they ate grass on 45^o slopes instead of the flat farmland I’m used to. Then, as we descended partway down the mountains, the vegetation grew denser and we hurtled along winding roads overlooking cliffs and jungle.

The bus dropped me off on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, and I began my mile-long climb up the mountain to the reserve. The walk was interesting and exciting, but it went on…and on…and on…

I finally found the volunteer house and lots of nice, helpful volunteers who showed me around, gave me lunch, and told me that this was actually one of their Long Weekends, when everyone leaves the reserve to travel Ecuador. I was invited on a trip to see the whales on the southern coast of Ecuador, so only a few hours after arriving, I was off down the mountain again, back to up Quito, and then on a 12-hour night bus that dropped us off in a small, sleepy port town at 6:30 am.

Fortunately our hostel was ready for us, and we had a lovely breakfast of fresh fruit and rolls before starting our explorations. Today we went to the dry forest national park and the beaches and a town built on an archeological site. The dry forest was strange – it looked like winter but felt like summer, because here the deciduous trees lose their leaves in summer when it’s dry, rather than the winter when it’s cold. It was still beautiful, though grey, and the beaches and the water were especially marvelous. We watched pelicans diving for fish and sand crabs scuttle across the beach and splashed in the water ourselves for a bit before hiking back and making our way to the village. They had a small museum there, and a guided tour of the museum and the town, which was great, except it was in Spanish. I understood it fine, but my three companions (two from Germany and one from the UK) didn’t understand any Spanish, so I became unofficial interpreter for the group, with the guide kindly stopping every few sentences for me to translate. The tour was very interesting, about the civilization that lived here around the time of the Incas and what they knew about it, which wasn’t much because the funding for the research had run out a few years ago and all they can do now is maintain the site as best they can.