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Hola amigos, sorry it has taken us a while to sit down and write anything on this so now we have to try to remember what seems like ages ago!!
We landed in Madrid and picked up our Spanish hire car (a Skoda!)- called Juan Pedro Montoya (couldn't be Pablo due to my car at home!) and decided to head west towards Portugal and look for a campsite to stay in. Pretty much straight away we got stuck in loads of traffic for ages and it started to get late so we turned off and followed sat nav Jane to a campsite. Our first opportunity to speak Spanish failed miserably when we realised that we really needed to do more studying! With a bit of a battle we worked out that the campsite wasn't open yet and got very vague directions to another one. This was open but was slightly creepy as no one else seemed to be there. We managed to order loads of food as we weren't sure how big things would be or whether we'd actually managed to order them!
The following morning we met up with some of our friends, Dave snake and Kirsty who had been driving down towards Portugal for the last week and stopped for lunch before crossing the border and heading to the Freecuency festival site. Some of our friends were involved in organising the trance stage and taking the sound systems to Portugal. We spent four nights (in a field!) at the festival.
After the festival we decided not to head hours in the wrong direction to the Portuguese coast with our friends as we needed to make sure we were back in Madrid for our flight to Ecuador. So instead we camped in Madrid for a couple of days and explored the city centre and tried the tapas!
Following a really long and boring flight, in which I managed to complete a whole sudoku book!!, we arrived in Quito, Ecuador in early evening. We got ourselves a taxi to the Mariscal (or New Town) area to find a hostel. We managed at this point to slightly freak ourselves out that the city was so dangerous that we'd probably be attacked as soon as we got out of the taxi and so made the taxi driver stop right outside a hostel and made a mad dash for it! We then decided that we had to go out at some point that evening as otherwise we thought we might not ever be brave enough to leave! So we went for some food and a beer and felt much better! The next morning felt so much better so we changed hostels for a better room and explored the area. We went to the bus station on the other side of the city via electric buses that run in their own bus lane and arranged bus tickets for the following night to go to Manta to visit Elena.
After booking these bus tickets we spoke to Elena and realised that she wasn't actually going to be in Manta when our bus arrived as she had gone to Canoa, a beach town 3 hours away, for the weekend. So on arrival we had to knock at the door of Elena's neighbours, the family of her friend Bimala, and try to get the key for her apartment. We managed to wake Bimala's little brother up who had, probably due to just being woken up, completely forgotten that we were coming and was probably very tweaked out to see two gringos at his door at 8 in the morning who hardly spoke a word of Spanish and shoved an iphone through his door into his hand with Elena on the line! He did give us the keys though and point us in the right direction to Elena's apartment. Elena arrived back the following evening and it was really exciting to see her! We went out for ice cream and really awful cocktails!
Manta is quite a big city but doesn't have much of a tourist industry so we've had lots of time to be lazy and not done a huge amount here. We did manage to get ourselves burnt on our first sunbathing outing to the beach and felt really stupid as burnt tourists! We also learnt from this experience that we weren't very good at applying suncream as we only burnt in the bits we missed- most embarrassingly I had bright red knees!
For my birthday we went, with Elena and Bimala, to Monti Christy a town about 20min bus journey from Manta and where Panama hats were actually invented! We went to a museum about Ecuadorian history and had a Spanish guide show us round and didn't understand a word! Then went for a really good meal in a lovely Italian restaurant which is up a hill and has lovely views of Monti Christy and Manta and has really pretty gardens and a cute kitten! We decided to put off my birthday diving trip for a few days as we were going to Montinita at the weekend.
Montinita is a town about 3 hours south of Manta and is a very touristy little hippy town with lots of bars, restaurants and artisan stalls (which I particularly liked!). It was really nice to feel really safe and relax and not really do much! Bimala and his dad run a stall there and so he goes most weekends and so we met lots of his and Elena's friends. During our time in Montinita we discovered the really ridiculous and annoying new law recently passed in Ecuador that bans the sale of alcohol anywhere on a Sunday.
We all went to Puerto Lopez, about an hour north for a day diving trip. It was Bimala's first dive so he was really excited and absolutely loved it! We went to a national park island off the coast which is called Isla de la Plata and known as the Poor Man's Galapagos and has some of the the animals there- including blue footed boobies which just chill out all over the rocks and lots of pelicans. The diving wasn't amazing but we did see quite a few things including our first ever diamond stingray sleeping on the sand. It was really nice to be back diving again and to realise we still knew what we were doing! And Will's ears didn't block and he could still hear afterwards so he was really pleased.
Another day we went to Moray's Cabana (jungle bamboo house). Moray is a friend of Bimala's (also Columbian- lots of Columbians live in Ecuador as the cost of living is lower and there are less problems than in Columbia with some remote areas being dangerous due to the Guerillas). The Cabana is about an hours walk through the jungle from Montinita and Moray built it about 10 years ago. The boys had to cut down the weeds on the land around the Cabana and Will enjoyed playing with machetes- until afterwards when he realised the extent of the mosquito attack! Elena and I used the very limited kitchen ware and the fire in the Cabana to make a yummy meal of rice and vegetables!
After a few quiet days back at Elena's apartment in Manta (mostly trying to cram in lots of Spanish lessons) Will and I headed to Canoa a beach town north of Manta. We had been to check the bus times the day before and so were aiming for a particular bus only to find that the bus no longer existed and so had to catch a bus, change in another town and then get another one! Canoa is supposed to be a bit of a party town with a beautiful beach so we were quite disappointed when we got there and it was really quiet and there was rubbish and seaweed/ driftwood covering the whole beach. We think there must have been a storm before we got there as Elena was really surprised when she saw our photos. We also discovered that it was really quiet due to a three day alcohol ban in place because of some elections going on- not really sure why but we think maybe it's to avoid any violence erupting, or the government want the people to be clear headed and think really hard about their votes?! Anyway none of the bars could serve alcohol and the police kept patrolling in the evening, most of the small beach bars just closed completely and it seemed like there was also a ban on music! We decided to camp the first night and so spent all night really uncomfortable and not sleeping, and had a small swarm of mosquitos in the tent with us! So... we treated ourselves to a nice room the following day instead of roughing it again! We had a really chilled out weekend, managed to catch the end of the Grand Prix on Sunday morning and came back to Manta on Sunday.
One final story!! We had a few problems trying to book some flights to the Galapagos, mainly that all the airlines' websites were really rubbish! We were able to book the flights but the site crashed when we got to the payment part! We thought it just didn't like the card we were using so tried a couple of times with different cards before having to give up and get Bimala to take us to a travel agents to book them, which actually worked out fine as they cost exactly the same! But when I checked our bank accounts a couple of days later I realised that we had been charged for a two different sets of flights from the wrong company and not been sent any flight details. We were so lucky that Bimala was there as he spent the whole day at the travel agents, on the phone and writing emails to get the £800 back for us! Something that we're pretty sure we wouldn't have been able to do with our very limited Spanish!!
We are now having our last couple of days in Manta before heading to Montinita again on Wednesday so we can try surfing and then we head south to Guayaquil, the other big city, from where we are flying on Sunday to the Galapagos to try and find some lizards, turtles, tortoises, sharks, penguins, sea lions and lots of birds! Will update this again afterwards (probably with lots and lots of pictures!)
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kat Hey chappies! Nice to finally hear what your gettin upto - galapagos will be fab. Miss your ugly faces xxxx