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Location: Montanita, Ecuador
Weather: 27 - 30* avg.
This blog entry is written in English so that my friends from Australia also can take part in tracking our journey.
After a 26 hour transport leg with Condor Air and a pre-booked Minivan from the Airport in Guayaqil we arrived at Montanita and checked our gear into Las Cabanas Hostel. In our newly purchased Lonely Planet book Montanita is described as a: ´bare feet, baggy, surf scene. Either you hate it or love it´. Today I bough a I love Montanita T-shirt´ (due to a lack of clean t-shirts), but I feel it is still a bit early to taka a stance on my official position. At first thought the place gives associations to cheap charter-tourist places like Sunny Beach, where young-drunk Scandinavians are replaced by young and drunk Argentineans. Having hoped for more Ecuadorians and less Argentineans on this stage of our journey I can definitely understand why some travelers, especially the ones interested in more local culture despise Montanita. The party culture doesn`t seem to be rather unique in other words…
But the place does offer a soft landing to the Spanish language. I didn't know any Spanish before travelling to South America and Ecuador, as the plan was to learn the basic phrases here. The tourist-friendly services available in Montanita definitely softened the start of our journey relating to different day to day business - framed trough questions like ´how, where and what´.
Yet still, after one week of Spanish training ( 4 hours a day) I am thankful that the ´Que, Donde y Como´ can be supplemented with some Spanglish in day to day situations. So rather than loving the place for its commercialized-uncultured scenery, the ´I love Montanita´ T-shirt suggest that I appreciate the ability to enjoy a couple of comfortable weeks on a beach resort without to much fuzz.
But learning Spanish is not all we have been doing. On Friday and Saturday we tried out surfing. Elise actually turned out to be quite the talent, shifting from paddling position to surf position ´in the wave´ like the pro`s do already within her first hour. For yours truly the story was quite different. Being assigned the board the instructors called ´the Titanic´ I understood that the odds were not in my favor. And as expected I was paddling like a wounded whale and thrown around by the waves, like I were in a washing machine. I did not expect, on the other hand, that I after 15-20 minutes of heavy beating would be flashing my ass?!? What happened was that, In addition to giving the 100 kg of Norwegian raw-muscle a rough time, the weaves also shred to pieces my newly purchased (Ecuadorian-made) 8$ boardshorts. To Elise and the other witnesses on the beach the scene (or crime if you will) was apparently quite entertaining. Fortunately for me, the next day of surfing was less entertaining, and as with my Spanish the surfing skill slightly improved a bit as well.
Other than learning to speak Spanish and Surf we have done little else but relaxing: We have read two books each. We have manage to find a place where they sell lunch/almuerzo for 1,50$ per person (to Elise`s great joy). We have almost used up both the 30-block sun cream-lotion and the Alo Vera After-Sun lotion (to my skin`s great ´joy´). We have tried out fruit- and rum heavy Pina Colada´s and Mojito´s at the ´Cocktail street´… And we have shaked our asses off to the salsa rhythm at the very same ´Cocktail street´ and in at the disco where the dance floor is all sand.
Maybe it is not ´I love Montanita´ just yet, but it is still a rather nice place to learn Spanish.
Andreas
- comments
Freddy Nice reading. Hope you are enjoying your time there, and keep posting stuff from your journey.
Snoop Dougy Doug Sounds like you're having a good time. I expect both your Spanish and your surfing to greatly improve in the next weeks. Easing yourself into the speaking situation was probably the best plan of attack - but only if you actually get better at Spanish.