Sunday 18 March 2012

Had a lovely breakfast of crepe de frutas with a side of chocolate sauce: yum! Then it was pack up and checkout time, where I made my way to where I saw buses parked in a square (but it´s not an official bus terminal), hoping that I could catch a bus there.

Trying to find someone to ask, I saw a few of the bus drivers and conductors napping in the storage space under the bus: it was shady and looked cool - just what I needed, whilst waiting for someone to wake up. I managed to find one guy awake (there weren´t that many people around to ask) where the bus to San Vicente was and he told me to go to the bus behind. So I prepared to wait in the heat, but I wondered how long it would be before anyone got up and whether I'd still be waiting (and could last) till lunch time: they all looked like they´d settled in for a good long nap!

Eventually, after about an hour, someone woke up and I was able to ask him about a bus to Bahia or San Vincente, and he told me to go back onto the street and that a bus would be by in about 10 minutes, so I hotfooted it (if you can hotfoot with a backpack and a frontpack!) to the very hot main street out of Canoa. It was so hot that the choc ice lolly I bought whilst waiting immediately collapsed into a lovely gooey mess.

Anyway, with a bit of help, I managed to get the right bus to San Vincente (there were some local buses and a chartered bus) from which I then got a panga boat across the estuary to Bahia (short for Bahia de Caraquez), having had a conversation with the bus conductor as to whether that would be faster than the road. I wasn´t sure but he mentioned Guyaquil so I figured it might not be passing through Bahia, and anyway, it´d be a different mode of transportation than the norm!

The panga boat made it to the jetty and I got a taxi to a hotel/hostal, where I managed to get a dorm room ($6) to myself including the private bathroom that went with the room. I met a British-Spanish couple there, Ramona and Dan, who had been travelling for 2 years.

Bahia de Caraquez has been re-invented as an eco-city, but the only things that I could see which qualified it as an eco-city, was the Rio Muchacho Organic farm, for which you could do a 3-day tour, although why it needs 3 days, I don't know, plus the presence of tricicleros in addition to taxis. Although my (2-years-out-of-date) guidebook mentions recycling as one of the projects Bahia has taken on (as well as conservation), one guy helping out at a hostel, says they don't recycle plastic bottles, when we asked where we could dispose of ours.

I had dinner with Ramona and Dan on the jetty (at least, I had dinner: they'd eaten earlier) and they drank cerveza. Apparently, you can't drink beer without food on a Sunday, in Ecuador, but they thought it might be OK if I ate and they could drink with me, whilst I ate.