No more beach

1. Sorry we are not updating the blog as much. Now that we are moving around more (and we do not have free internet) it is a little more difficult. But we are trying.

2. PLEASE comment on our posts. We love hearing from home. We also love to know who is reading the blog and what you think about our adventures.

3. What we have been up to (I will try not to repeat anything that Katie said and hopefully I will not leave anything out!):

We spent Saturday at a beautiful set of quiet beaches called Los Frailes (part of Machalilla National Park). They were located about twenty minutes for Puerto Lopez. The water was clear, the sand was soft and it was not crowded at all. We walked down the beaches to take a look at the monsterous rocks that make up the points of each beach. It was beautiful and realaxing. We took some wonderful photos and will post them in the near future. I hope that one day I can return to this place.

We took a bus there and a ´moto taxi´ back. The moto taxi is a motorbike that has a little carriage attached to it for passengers. They are all over Puerto Lopez and we think that ours had a flat tire. When we got back to Puerto Lopez we began to witness the transformation of the city into a carnaval town. Crowds of people began to pour into the city. The beach was covered with people. On Sunday, we tried to avoid the crowds by walking to the very end of the beach were it was not as crowded. It was nice at this spot, but we were ready to get the heck out of the beachtown. There was an unbelievable amount of mud, tons of people and every restaurant jacked their prices up. We figured out the next bus did not leave until four o clock the following day so we hung out in town trying to avoid have eggs chucked at us or water dumped on us (all part of the carnaval so we just laughed it off). On our last day in Puerto Lopez (monday) we enjoyed batidos on the beach and a wonderful almuerzo from our favorite little eating spot. We had fresh shrimp soup (packed with veggies and potatos), panfried fish (also fresh), rice and salad.

Random Sidenote: DISCLAIMER: we are not pedophiles for befriending all these adorable Latin American children... We were lucky enough to make friends with an eight year old boy named Hugo during the carnaval festivities. We played monopoly with him and his sister, he quizzed us on our spanish and he told us that we sounded like Tarzan when we talked (?!).


So, overall Puerto Lopez was wonderful...but we were ready to leave. We wanted to go to Ambato for the fruit and flower festival. However, our hostal owner showed us a newspaper that had pictures of the highway to Ambato destroyed by mudslides. So, we had a change of plans. We could have either taken the bus back to Quito (which did not sound good since we just came from there) or to Guayaquil (which we heard was not that great). We opted for Guayaquil and figured we could catch another bus the next day to Cuenca. We took the bus to Guayaquil and when we arrived at the bus terminal at about eight thirty last night and decided we did not want to stay in Guayaquil for the night... so we grabbed another bus to Cuenca. We arrived here in Cuenca at two thirty in the morning today. The first hostal that we went to had a room for us and we woke up this morning to a beautiful view from the hostal´s kitchen.


Today we have lazily wandered the city. It is super quiet except for the occasional truck of kids to drive by with water balloons (it is the last day of Carnaval). It feels like we are in a battle and I am suspicious of anyone, or anything that comes by us because there is a good chance they will have some sort of carnaval weapon. We stumbled upon a Panama Hat Museum (because they are made in Ecuador, not Panama), a small flower market, a beautiful plaza and the Tomebamba river which runs through the city. Once again I find myself saying how much I love this place even though I say it everytime we arrive somewhere new. We will probably move on from Cuenca fairly quickly and will try to update the blog when we arrive at our next destination.

I hope all is well at home still. We miss everyone. Hallye