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Manta is our first stop in Ecuador. We had a half day excursion into the city for a quick tour and then on to Montichristi where the best Panama hats are made. I got a really good one after alot of haggling. The price we settled on was just about half of the starting price so I think I did well enough. We saw the whole process of making them and now I know why they cost so much. The one that I bought took six months work by fine or six different people according to Marta our guide. Women stand up and lean over a post set into the ground and weave hundreds of strands of paja toquilla reeds all day long. The brims are finished by special workers and each hat is is sprinkles with powdered sulphur and pounded with a large wooden mallet to makenit supple and soft almost like cloth. The best ones look and feel like silk and can be passed through a wedding ring and come out just like new. I am happy!! There was also a tour of a button factory these buttons are made from a nut that grows on tagua palm tree. The nits grow on a spiky cluster and take seven years to mature. They ate then harvested and broken out of the cluster and spread on the ground. They look like small potatoes but become very hard when dried. The nut is then sawed into slices, sorted and passed on to women who take each slice and mount it into a lathe and push a leaver which makes them into round disks of various sizes. No holes are drilled into them here. They have the color and feel of ivory and are shipped to Europe for use in making high end garments. It was very noisy and dangerous work. The workers are paid a minimum wage of $365 a month and if their production quota is exceeded they are paid a bonus. Another stop was a little town where the Coimbatore out palm fibers and spin sisal and weave it into rough cloth to make gunny sacks. They demonstrated the old machines thae were used in the past but the process has been automated these days. The last stop was a quick walk around the Natural History Museum and we we headed back to the ship in time for lunch.
Manta is a big fishing port and we spent the afternoon watching a the activities on the dock from unloading several hundred small pickup trick and cars from a RORO ship docked beside us to watching 30 guys show up on the back of a large semi trailer with a large open top cage on it to remove the giant net off the back of one of the many large tuna boats and haul it away for repair. About six of the our ships crew and chef staff were on the dock making a deal for a bunch of large tuna and other sea food straight off the fishing boats. There were several bottles of Jack Daniels and Johnny Walker that changed hands that I am surehelped smooth the price negotiations. There is going to be a lot of fresh sushi in the next few days. Yea!
We set sail for Peru at 5:30 a half hour late because the fuel lighter took longer than expected to fill up our tanks. It is not a good thing to run out of fuel in the middle of the ocean. The tow bill would be huge.
We had dinner last with two other couples he had dined with early on in the cruise. They are all long time cruise people and had lots of stories to tell about previous trips including one where Eric and Sue were caught on this ship in a big storm in the Davis Strait between Greenland and Labrador where the Captain was forced to head the wrong way for three days in 40 foot waves till they had to turn around because they were starting to run out I'd food. They encountered two 60 footers which completely turned the ship into a submarine for a few minutes. The promenade deck was wiped clean of deck chairs and the gangway mountedn on the bow deck was gone and the whole interior of the ship was a mess but Sue said she didn't want us to be discouraged from crusing. She did give us one tip, eating green apples with the skin on helps with sea sickness. That bit of information might come in handy someday but hopefully not in this trip.
Well that was enough excitement for one day.
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