December 1, 2016
We woke up with the chickens, literally today because when there’s no power to run our room fan, you can actually hear them in the morning. So, there’s no power, a limited amount of hot water, and it’s overcast and misty out. I think I was praying too hard for sun yesterday.
We decided to take a risk and walk to the restaurant advertising French toast. It just sounded so good! We know from our travels that power goes out more frequently in some places than others, and in touristy spots, this means they all have generators. So, I walked into the restaurant, which also houses a hotel, and the guy running the front desk looks at me and says Desayuno? I say si, and he answers back no with a shake of the head and a bunch of other words. Crap, there goes our Ecuadorian French toast feast. We start to walk away and Nathan has this brilliant idea to send in the slightly better Spanish speaker to find out why no breakfast. Turns out Desayuno starts at 8, and we were there at 7:30. Happily, we walked around town for 30 minutes before we returned for our French feast. Two scrambled eggs, two thick slices of French toast, coffee, and juice for a whopping $5. Lucile’s could learn a thing or two.
The mist stopped but it was still overcast, so we decided to walk down to the southern end of the Malecon where we’ve been told the locals snorkel. A beach dog joined us on the trip and all three of us looked at the huge pile of rocks (low tide) at which we were supposed to snorkel come high tide. Hmm. We walked back toward town, dog in tow, and met Jerry from Toronto, whose dog Lola had been walking with us. “She does this with everyone, especially foreigners.” Jerry confirmed that we should come back at 3 pm to snorkel. Hmm.
We kept looking at the sky saying things like “it seems like it’s getting lighter” and “the sun wants to come out”. We opted for another tuk tuk ride to get us from the south end of the beach where the snorkeling is, to the north end where our place is. $1.
Our hotel has its own sorta private beach with little beach cabanas. So we parked ourselves there, borrowed some hammocks from the front desk, and read, relaxed, and played in the waves until 2:30. The sun came out for good about 1 or so and made for a wonderful rest of the day.
At 2:30 we decided to leave all our junk at the hotel, and depart for snorkeling with our suits, towels, snorkels, and $2 in Sacagawea dollars for transportation. (This is where our $1 coins are by the way if you were wondering why you never see one in the states. They are very valuable here.)
We had no luck in the rocky snorkeling spot but got into and out of the water unscathed. We tried another spot near the wharf where there is a bay protected by rocks. In low tide, it looked like a garbage pit you wouldn’t want to put your body in, but we did and easily saw puffers, rays, and other little fish. Success.
