Saturday, May 29, 2010

Puerto Lopez, Ecuador

BY PAUL BY PAUL BY PAUL BY PAUL BY PAUL BY PAUL BY PAUL BY PAUL BY PAUL

So after Montanita, I travelled for a while with the Swedish guy Daniel and the two French boys, Yannis and Marc.  We decided to go to Puerto Lopez together to check out Isla de la Plata and Los Frailes. 

Los Frailes was apparently supposed to be the 13th best beach in the world.  Again, I was a little disappointed.  Yes, the beach was fairly deserted and the sand was clean, but the water wasn't exactly crystal blue as I had hoped.  It was more green than blue, maybe because it was a cloudy day.  But either way, I spent the afternoon there just to relax, to swim and to catch crabs on the beach. 

Yannis and Marc thought that was pretty boring and went off to do a spear fishing tour.  They were telling me how good it was except that they caught nothing for dinner that night.  I probably would have had more luck bringing back a tray of crabs instead, if they had told me earlier.

The next day we went to Isla de la Plata.  That was really pretty I thought.  We had to catch a boat which took about 2.5 hours.  It was very bumpy but it was well worth it.  We saw heaps of turtles, different types of boobie birds and vultures etc.  If you remembered how close we got to the penguins in Punta Tombo in Patagonia, Argentina, we were that close to the wildlife.  There were also supposed to be albatross and seals there.  But we were there just before the breeding season, and didn't get to see any unfortunately. 

The baby boobies were extraordinary cute.  They were screaming heaps when I walked past.  I felt really sorry for them, so I fed some of them Mars bars and rice crackers.  I think they really enjoyed it as they started pecking me for more. 

We later also went snorkelling with the turtles and saw sea horses and thousands of coral fish.  Yannis also nearly got bitten by a turtle when he was feeding the turtle watermelon.  It was hilarious to see the giant sea turtle swimming after him to try to bite him.

I didn't quite get to Galapagos as part of this trip, but I really enjoyed Isla de la Plata.

We came back to have dinner in town before we caught a night bus to Quito.  The French boys had three  lobsters between them which they finished in like 15 minutes as we were running really, really late for the bus.  I also nearly choked on my spaghetti marinara.  But I managed to stop the bus for them....except that I accidentally left my jumper behind in the hostel and had to run back to get it.....

PS - I didn't really feed the baby boobies.  And definitely no Mars bars and rice crackers.  The ranger said we shouldn't feed them despite their starvation state......

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