Boy, Ecuador & Peru Was Fun

Hey Everybody,

Where to start? It's been one wacky-excellent adventure getting us here: first we were just little fetuses. Then we grew up and got picked on a lot in school. Then we got jobs and I lost mine and my girlfriend quit hers and we sublet our place in Atlanta, Georgia and decided to go traveling for the summer of '08. 

Turned out, we just went on a blitzkrieg of bus, taxi and plane trips in the month of June. We made short-shrift of everything, including every tasty morsel that entered a one-mile radius of our stupid mouths. And I do mean every single little unwashed ticky-taco we could find.

So, back to our trip, it was fun. Like an Advil commercial is fun: pain and suffering mixed with cool relief in the end. We first flew into Guayaquil, Ecuador and from there proceeded to romp all over the southern half of the equator-straddled country. Highlights included:

• Getting the fuck out of Guayaquil as soon as possible (it's Ecuador's largest city full of urban blight and not much else). 
• Taking the bus to much-much-much lovelier ciudad of Cuenca. The trip was a hair-raising, road-winding adventure through the Andes, complete with a DVD presentation of the updated version of The Omen in subtitles. I believe it was called Un Nino de Diablo.
• Hanging out in Cuenca. Pronounced "Qwayn-Ca," this charming little metropolis is like a transplant from Switzerland plopped down in the middle of South America. It's got European-style grid city planning, cobblestone streets, beautiful churches and a 360-degree backdrop of mountains. 

• Going to a sensory-deprivation tank while in Cuenca. I've always wanted to do this, so it was even better in Spanish! Well, not really. The floating around in saline solution was fun, but because we're Americans, they put on some cheesy English-speaking relaxation tape that kept saying, "Imagine you're floating in space..." We were floating! We didn't have to imagine it. Grrr.
• Going to a natural hot springs spa just outside of Cuenca. I believe they called it "Banos." As in "bathrooms." Very posh. Very warm. Again, felt like we were in Europe. 

And that was about it for Ecuador. Seriously. It was very beautiful and scenic but despite being situated directly on the belly of this here planet Earth, it was rather chilly. And we weren't having none of it. So, we decided to get on a bus and head towards northern Peru. And that's just what we did. 

Only problem: nobody told us that the Ecuadorian-Peruvian border crossing is considered the WORST in South America. We're talking wild, wild west shit. Highlights included:

• That lovely picture I'm currently using as header for this blog. Yes, that says "Here's The Taliban." And yes, that's a giant mural painted on a wall near the border of Osama and his AK47-toting buddies reenacting Washington crossing the Potomac except with the Twin Towers being destroyed in the background. I asked our taxi driver several times if he could explain what the hell was going on there. He said, "No." 
• Checking into our hotel at the border for a frightful overnight stay. As the girl at the front desk was handing us our keys, a fellow guest also arrived (carried by two of his buddies) with what appeared to be a waterfall of his own shit smearing down the backside of his jeans. Poor chap. Hope he's cleaned up by now.
• (Barely) making it across the border the next morning. Somehow, we let these two guys in a '82 Datsun station wagon convince us they could transport us through security better than the thousands of other people that were doing it just fine all by their lonesome. Sigh. Oh, and there were puppies in cages too. For sale, I believe.

But not for us. Where the hell were we going to stick a lil' pooch? In our backpacks? But anywho, after we got our passports stamped, we made a beeline for the fabled beaches of northern Peru. Our expectations of them were pretty high; the guidebooks and other various websites had talked them up as nothing less than the Target-version of the French Riviera: beautiful and luxurious but extremely affordable. Sounds nice, huh? When we arrived in Mancora (the prime beach destination there), we found out that that clearly wasn't the case. Far from being a coastal wasteland, Mancora wasn't exactly the undiscovered Eden we were hoping for either. Nevertheless, we managed to have fun. Highlights included:

• Surfing! Aaaaaat laaaaaast!! There is one big break in Mancora and every surfer is out there almost everyday trying to ride it. Some fail, some succeed. But because demand for it is so high, there's not much pettiness about the over-crowding. Christ, I had a kite surfer drop in on my wave at one point from 50 feet above me. He just smiled and rode away. 
• The food. The Pan-American Highway runs straight through the town and there's no sidewalks to be had. Which means every nice restaurant comes with a gorgeous view of 18-wheelers flying by every few minutes. But that didn't change the fact that 99% of the meals we had there were scump-deee-lee-ump-tious. 
• Christin's big surf bummer. One day, the girlfriend decided to get a surf lesson, which was a great idea. For a small fee, a local will swim out with you, set you up on a wave and push you onto it. However, because of the aforementioned crowd on the one big break in Mancora, some dude ran his longboard into my sweet, beautiful, lovely girlfriends' face, giving her a big gash under her right eye, a nasty bump on her head and an abrupt end to her fun. 
• Deciding to leave South America. Maybe it was the sheer enormity of it all. Maybe it was the fact that neither one of us have jobs to look forward to when we get back. But for some reason, it was in Mancora where we decided to call our airline, tell them someone died and have our flight date moved so that we could fly to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico as soon as possible.

And that's exactly what we did. Again, there's not much explanation. We just got anxious. All it took was a phone call and an overnight bus back to Guayaquil, Ecuador to prematurely jump start what was supposed to be our long-awaited second-half of our adventure. 

Stay tuned for Mexico in the next post...