After a long night bus drive from Otavalo to Manta, we finally made it out of our microcosmos in Cotacachi to the beach. The bus drive itself was very shaky and but the touring car was really luxury which made up for it. I wasn’t really into getting the bus but Tanja was right that it is the mode of transportation in South America.
Arriving with a bus jetlag, we ended up in Manta surrounded by taxi drivers where you bags get snapped out of your hands and carried towards a yellow cab. We arrived at 6 am and were in Canoa at 7 am.
I was especially happy to get into better weather and finally seeing the sea. As said before I did not have any real vacation in three years so being at the beach, the salt, hear the sea – the beach is the place where I feel best. And Anais liked it as well.
In the beginning, she was a bit scared about the water but in the end, she really liked the water and the swimming. Which meant we had to prevent her from running into quite big waves.The water is magnificent in Canoa. It is not too cold and not too warm. It gives you a cooling down from the hot humid climate and the waves are great!
I bought a blue playset with shovels and stuff and it is her favorite part of our trip so far. All the other toys were hardly used but the beach playset she liked really a lot.We had a bit of a mosquito bugs problem. Myself and Anais got bitten if we did not put on mosquito repellent. Canoa is a really small fisherś place without even an ATM. We stayed at Hotel Amalur right in the center. If you could say it is a center. It is more like a dust city at the beach with no paved roads.
Canoa was hit really hard by the earthquake back in April 2016. Some people were still living in tents and improvising their lives after the earthquake. Canoa is also known for surfing and it seems that everybody does surf there all day. The town was pretty empty – we sometimes thought we were the only tourists in town. All in all, we had a great beach vacation there. Sometimes we even had the whole beach to ourselves. In the weekends the crowd got bigger but most of them were from Ecuador – not foreigners. We just relaxed more than a week and enjoyed the laid backness of the place, the beach, the waves and the food.
Anais played great at the beach and Tanja did take some surf lessons. Tanja was able to stand on the board and learned surfing. She got lessons from a 20-year old kid who works as a barkeeper and surfs from their early age on.
The coast is very different from Otavalo. Much less indigenous people much more Spanish influence. People are relaxed but not as relaxed as in Otavalo.
We spend way too much time in Canoa, in the end, we always met the same people. The surf guy on his small bicycle, the waitress from the hotel with her boy bicycle riding, the blond backpacker that fell in love with a Canoa man. I went one day to Manta to get the stuff shipped to Holland we bought for www.nutur.nl. It was a crazy ride with a bureaucrat and a taxi driver from Canoa through Manta searching for an official invoice. The food was ok but we got sick a few times. The beach bars are not 100% hygienic. You even have to watch out with cocktails.
There are some characters like in every town. For example, the two sisters running a cocktail bar at the beach. We even met some “expats” at a street corner. One looked like Bob Marley himself – the expat version. There would be much more to tell but we are already at the end of our Galapagos adventure part. I also need a much better Internet connection to do stuff for this blog 🙂
It isn’t a town to get stuck but we got stuck somehow….