The Beach

For starters, an adorable cat that I met on Thursday morning behind my house:
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1352.jpg

I finally managed to actually go and do something this weekend – I went to the beach with Marie. The four of us went shopping on Thursday, having failed again to ride the teleférico (this time Pichincha was too cloudy to bother), and Marie told me she was going to the beach with her friend Eduardo and his friend Nelo, and she begged me to come along.

It took some prodding, but eventually I decided to go. The original plan was to leave Thursday evening for a three-hour drive to…well, we weren’t actually sure where. I headed to Marie’s house and had dinner there, and then Eduardo called and told her that it was too dangerous to drive at night, that we ran the risk of getting car-jacked, and he would rather leave at 6am on Friday morning. So I stayed at Marie’s that night, and got up at 5:30am. The guys, of course, didn’t actually show up until 7:15, by which time Marie and I were grousing about how we could have gotten another hour of sleep apiece. The drive turned out to be not three but five and a half hours, and we had lunch in Atacames at 12:30.

We got spectacularly bored in the car and started taking pictures.

Of each other:
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1364.jpg

http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1365.jpg

Of ourselves:
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1367.jpg

...making funny faces:
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1368.jpg

Of the view:
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1370.jpg

http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1375.jpg

Gum anyone?
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1373.jpg

Of each other taking pictures:
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1374.jpg

Marie takes a nap on my lap:
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1380.jpg

After lunch we finally reached Eduardo’s aunt’s condo in Casablanca. It reminded me a bit of being in Grand Cayman, the house and the beach and the weather. It was probably somewhere around eighty degrees and humid, the kind of humid where you get out of the shower and can’t dry off, no matter how many times you run the towel over yourself. We spent a while sunbathing on the balcony, and then went for a walk on the beach. I waded into the ocean and had a good time playing in the waves, though I refused to actually swim.

Marie and Eduardo:
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1383.jpg

Lounging out on the balcony Friday afternoon:
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1384.jpg

View from the balcony:
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1385.jpg

A walk on the beach:
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1393.jpg
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1396.jpg

Nelo, me, Marie, and Eduardo:
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1394.jpg

Just before sunset we walked back to the house and jumped into the “hot tub” (the same temperature as the pool, actually) and hung out there until after the sun went down. That night we went out to a bar in Atacames to dance, and honestly I wish I’d stayed at the condo. I was already tired when I went, and I didn’t wake up any after we had eaten a pizza and reached the bar. Eduardo bought us a round of caipirinas, then spent the rest of the night continually handing me mine when I didn’t drink it. It wasn’t that I forgot it was there, it was that I thought it was disgusting! What can I say, I don’t like tequila, and tequila with aguardiente is even worse.
Marie and I were both tired and ready to leave by midnight, and the guys told us we would leave soon. At 1:30, I was still sitting there, getting attacked by flying ants and playing with my cell phone. Finally Marie told Eduardo again that we wanted to go home, and that time he got the hint and we went. Of course, by the time I was in bed, I wasn’t tired anymore…go figure…and I was up until 4am.

The original plan was to leave on Saturday afternoon, but of course the only point of having a plan around here is that you know that’s what will NOT happen. I slept in, hung around reading for a while, then went for a walk with Marie and Eduardo to find lunch. We found an awesome little seafood place on the beach, where I got some of the best fried fish I’ve had in a very long time. I also got a coconut, where the vendor cuts off the top and sticks a straw straight into it. You drink the coconut milk, and then get it cut in half so you can eat the actual coconut. My camera decided to start working again in time for me to get a picture of it. It had been taking blank pictures the night before, but I think it just didn’t like the change in altitude, and the iris stuck shut for a while until it adjusted.

Coconut!
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1404.jpg

Inside the coconut:
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1407.jpg

Lunch, best fried fish ever:
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1409.jpg

I was happy with the previous day’s decision not to bathe myself completely in the ocean when we saw, on the way to lunch, a large pipe pouring something liquid and black into the swimming area. It looked suspiciously like raw sewage, so when Marie asked me if I wanted to go swimming again, I said no. Not waiting to catch my second wind this time, I went to bed obscenely early.

Sunset in a hammock:
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1410.jpg
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1411.jpg

Sunday morning I got up, managed to find some granola for breakfast, and then spent way too long reading in the pool. I went to find my sun block when Marie warned me I was turning red, but it was too late. We left the house around 3:30, had lunch/dinner in Atacames, and were finally on the road home by 5pm. Given that dark comes around 6:30, I wondered what had happened to their dire warnings about carjacking. Nobody seemed concerned, though, so I didn’t ask. I read my book until it was too dark to see, and then put on my iPod and started texting Craig out of shear boredom.

Lunch in Atacames before leaving:
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1412.jpg

We were into Pichincha province and under half an hour from Quito when all the cars in front of us stopped and put their blinkers on. Nelo stopped behind them and got out to see what was going on. After a minute or so he came back, and the entire line of cars turned around and went the other way. In less than five minutes, the same thing happened again. Stop, wait, turn around. Now think about this: once you have turned around twice, you’re repeating what you did the first time. At that point I was really wondering what the hell was going on.

Halfway back to the original stop point, a policeman directed us down a little dirt side road. We drove maybe half a mile, and then someone on the side of the road waved frantically. Eduardo rolled down his window, they conversed, and then we turned around again. I couldn’t imagine where else we could possibly go, but it turned out that we had missed another dirt path. Eduardo explained to us that there was a protest going on in the main road, and we had to drive around.
Eventually we made it back on track, and they dropped me off at my house. By that time we had been in the car for six and a half hours…so much for the three-hour drive.

All the bouncing on the poorly-kept roads through the small towns had pointed out to me just exactly how much my sunburn hurt now. Once I was in bed, Craig called to ask how the beach trip had gone. By that time I was dehydrated, shaking, tired, in pain, and starting to go into shock. I tried to hold myself together, but it wasn't five minutes before I found myself in tears. He convinced me to make the trip to the kitchen to get water, even though I could barely walk, and kept me awake long enough to drink it. By the time he told me it was safe to go to sleep a couple of hours later, that I had recovered enough that I wouldn't die before morning, I felt a lot better.

I bought aloe today for the sunburn, but I really can’t tell how much it’s helping. I know I didn’t dare take a shower today because I already feel like I’ve been skinned alive, and the water in my shower isn’t exactly gentle. I’m glad I got to the see the sun, though; apparently it poured rain in Quito the entire weekend.

This has not been my week for technology, either. On top of my camera having that temper tantrum, my watch rusted and then stopped, and my computer has caught a whole array of viruses that I can’t seem to get rid of. The camera is behaving at the moment, and I can get a new watch, but I’m not happy about the computer. I think what happened is that I picked up a virus on my flash drive from one of the café computers, and then transferred it to my own machine. When I got my computer on broadband last week, the one virus downloaded others for company, and now they are having a grand old party in my hard drive. I need to connect it to a network again so I can download virus updates, but I’m afraid that it will also download more trojans at the same time. I love technology – when it works.