Thanksgiving at the beach

I guess it´s been a while since I´ve posted an update-sorry! We´ve been bopping around Ecuador and have spent time in Baños, a cool mountain town with tons of adventure things to do and tons of beautiful waterfalls to see; stopped to see the beautiful Quilotoa crater lake in the mountains; and finally made it to the beach here in Ecuador. It took us a couple of days to make it here from the mountains in the center of the country, and in our journey we spent one night in the worst place yet. We got into this town called Portoviejo late at night, and didn´t seem to have many options in a safe neighborhood-so we ended up at Hostel Pacheco, for $3.50/night. It was horrible...Yucky bathroom with no toilet seat lid, no shower curtain (and you had to ask for tp), cot beds, dirty walls and a broken window...Good times! We stayed out a bit late trying to avoid spending an unneccesary amount of time in the room, but this town didn´t have much happening. We got up the next morning and we on our way, thankfully! We will just mark that place as our ¨worst place we stayed´, and move on...

Now we are in Puerto Lopez, a dusty little beach town on the coast of Ecuador. It´s a cute little town with not much going on. It´s been very nice to chill and relax here after the journey here and after being in mountains for a bit. The beach is nice and long and is great for a long walk or a jog. We spent our Thanksgiving here walking on the beach and eating seafood (a little different from all my previous Thanksgivings!).

Today we went to an island close by called Isla de La Plata (or otherwise known as ¨The Poor Man´s Galapagos). Since we can´t afford the Galapagos this time around, we figured this was a must do. It took about 1 hour and 20 minutes to get there on the boat, and the island looked quite nice from afar-tall cliffs dropping down to the ocean. When we started walking around we noticed how arid and desert-like it was. After a bit of a walk we started to see some of the cool birds-mostly the Blue-Footed Booby and the Frigate Bird. The cool thing was that these birds were all just sitting along the side of the trail, or sometimes on the trail-so we got a super closeup look at all of them. Many of the birds were sitting on just laid eggs, or warming about newly hatched baby birds. As we walked we started to see baby birds at all stages of growing, so that was pretty cool. The birds didn´t seem to mind our presence too much, but we would get a good sqwack if they thought we were too close. We walked for a couple of hours and saw more birds, but no other animals. After the walk and lunch we went snorkling but the visibility wasn´t very good. I enjoyed myself on the tour, but it was a bit overpriced for what we did. It was worth maybe $25, not $40...Oh well! I´m glad I saw the Blue-Footed Booby, check him out!