Whale watching with Winston Churchill

Our first day in Puerto Lopez we met Winston Churchill on the beach.

He's a lean man with kind eyes, a ready smile, and a helluva sales pitch for whale watching tours, informative without being pushy. Monday morning K and I joined a young Ecuadoran family of 6 on one of the ubiquitous little blue fiberglass(?) lancha boats.

They're perfectly fine boats, but not for whale watching seemed a little...small. But our intrepid captain (is there any other kind?) steered us out into the choppy bay, where we all stared out over the blank waves intently.

As with all wildlife watching, there was no guarantee, and one by one the pairs of eyes got bored of looking for fins like the one that suddenly reared up shockingly close to our bow.

The fin came up like Poseidon's elevator, sinking back into the water with grace that still astounds me on such a massive creature. Suddenly the boat seemed small indeed. A large adult humpback whale. Two. And then, their baby. And we were right on top of them.

Too close in fact. I resolutely oppose boats getting too close to the whales, especially with a baby, but when it was me in the boat...it was kinda hard to tell the captain to back up. I could only nod agreement once the captain of the other boat shouted that we were too close, and we backed off a bit, but I mentioned it to Winston later.

We gaped for an unknown amount of time as they reached fins into the air and slapped them down on the sea, cleaning off the parasites and gloop that accumulate on the deep sea blubbery ballerinas. (And given the number of oil tankers on the horizon and plastic on the beach, I fear the gloop levels are only increasing.) Occassionally black blobs that had presumably been knocked off would float past.

One of the adults flipped over on its back and just lay there at the surface, looking for all the world like it was sunbathing. And we were very close to one half-breach, which splashed us with a salty spray of leviathan gymnastics.

The whales were of course incredible, but one of the best parts was the driver's obvious pleasure and pride at the animals. "What a beauty! He's saying hello! What a show! What a beauty!"

They disappeared as suddenly as they'd come, so we went snorkeling, where I was amazed to see two eels, a Spanish stingray, schools of florescent fish, and a rather large octopus. I told the family about each, and when the boat crew heard about the octopus, the young assistant asked me to grab it, and when I declined, grabbed a knife and dove in after it.

I watched, hoping he wouldn't find it, and hid my smile when he surfaced to inform us that it was too big, and his little knife hadn't bothered it much. Another boat showed up, and their boathand jumped in with a bigger knife. Luckily they didn't find it again.

As we were about to leave I climbed out on the beach to collect a plastic bottle that had washed up there, and saw a second octopus close to shore, but didn't tell anyone about it this time.

Poseidon, that glorious ingrate, sent a pair of wee jellyfish to thank me, one on the shoulder and one on the ankle. The sting was pretty slight, and only lasted an hour, so added to the experience.

Squelchy amoebas, carbon monoxide poisoning, and your daily Wyclef reference.

The fridge in the musty cockroach-corpse kitchen didn't work (and one of the big veggie drawers at the bottom was full of about three gallons of...is that lemonade?) so every morning I'd run around the corner and buy two of those little bottles of yogurt to have with the fresh fruit we bought in the market the day before. Strawberries, uchuvas, and bananas, which, this being Ecuador, cost $0.05 each.

Lunch was usually the "almuerzo" lunch special in the shack with bare concrete floors under a palm frond roof where the waiter came to love us for our polite thank-you's and lack of demanding-customer rudeness. If they had veggie soup for the first course then K would get an almuerzo too, scooping her fried fish filet onto my plate when the mains came. I've never eaten so much fish. My blood's got more iodine than a Cub Scout camping trip, and more mercury than a thermometer; it gets hot and my nose turns red, I'm like a summertime Rudolph.

Dinner might be the Colombian place with the impressive salad, a pizza in the hippie place's loft, and/or street food, most likely corn-on-the-cob slathered in mayo and cheese then carried down onto the beach to watch the night-white waves sliding onto the sand as the cabanas ratcheted up the reggaeton.
Puerto Lopez was another broad sandy beach, which at low tide became a swamp of squirming squeezing squelching things in shallow salty splendor. There were of course crabs, ejecting water from their wave-flooded dens to create a miniature moonscape of pebbles and craters.

And I was now familiar with the tiny corkscrew snails and the filter-feeding creepy-crawlies, but I'd never noticed the little sluggy amoeba things that went sliding around like escaped particles of paisley. (There's two in the picture, most clearly in the bottom middle.)

I saw one approach a snail, and the snail extended itself violently from its shell to push the amoeba away. Not friends I guess.

Puerto Lopez is scattered with helpful tourist info signs like Hotel, Travel Agency, and my personal favorite: Karaoque. I applaud the Tourism Board who believes we all need to be aware of where the nearest karaoke bar is.

There were a few cars in town, but it was mostly motorcycles and motorcycle-taxis, the world-famous Tuk-tuk. Their drivers were often suave young men with slicked back hair and an absence of sleeves. Waiting for fares they would lounge on the half-bike, somehow making it look comfortable.

One long (iced) coffee break I watched a lad lounge on his bike, chatting to a friend who was filling scuba tanks with a compressor. It didn't occur to either of them that maybe the idling tuk-tuk's exhaust pipe shouldn't be directly next to the intake valve for the compressor. Did I mention they were filling scuba tanks? Yum yum.
Gotta love Ecuador.

And I do indeed love Ecuador, but tomorrow morning at 4:00 AM will be heading to Curacao, a wee island just above Venezuela, to visit some friends for about three months. Hasta luego Ecuador, I'll be gone till November...

Dead people, and double points for the cockroach.

On our way down from the Sanctuary of Olon we stopped by the area-typical small cemetery. A scattering of low crosses, concrete shells in differing sizes (at least one with the regional soccer team's logo), and burn piles where groundskeepers (maybe they're official) gather and burn grass and the occassional grave marker. Oops.

The one open restaurant's barbecue was not quite ready, so we watched the majority of the town's youth and women assemble in the plaza for free group aerobics. I love it when they do that. Do people do this elsewhere? They should.

Smiles, chatter, and seemingly unconscious little dance moves abounded as people took their places. Occassional little brothers commandeered stretching sticks to practice their ninja moves. Everyone stood behind their step, whether it was wood or a plastic crate, ready to go...but the teacher was missing. The announcer tried to fill for time, but his jokes about where she was sounded increasingly panicked.

She hadn't shown up when we left for dinner, and after the meal we passed the plaza to find the announcer had had to fill in for her, gamely giving it his all, and doing a pretty good job of it. Atta boy!

We spent the rest of the evening watching reruns of The Office on the one English channel, and left the next morning for Puerto Lopez, breakfasting on crackers on the bus while watching Harrison Ford in the epic conclusion of Airforce One, spraying crumbs when I periodically had to jump up and yell "Ameeeerikuuuuh, phuuuuk yeah!"

Then it was Puerto Lopez, where we stayed the first night in a bargain place owned, run, and slightly cleaned by an adorable pair of grandparents who urged us with giant smiles to start having babies. What, like, now?

But there were also beach cabana bars across the street blasting bass all night, and neither a fan nor mosquito net in the room, so we moved to an odd little hostel whose owner takes in all the town's abused animals. There were two cockateels, a turtle, a rabbit under the stairs, and a frickin kinkajoo next to the kitchen, pacing and scratching relentlessly, the poor little guy.

And Spike. Spike the massive pit bull, who would climb into my lap whenever I sat down, though only half his body fit, so the back half would be standing while the front half gazed up at me with sparkling eyes in a skull big enough to head-butt a horse. I miss that lug. (That's not Spike, unfortunately I didn't get a picture of him. He was at least twice the size of this fella, who was just enjoying his pile of sand across the street.)

We breakfasted on fresh fruit in the hostel kitchen, which managed to be impressively musty despite being open-air, and each morning it was a game of find-the-new-cockroach-corpse. "Ooh, it's IN the pot we use to boil water! Double points!

Maybe a sacrilege of wealth. Maybe a miracle of blood.

Ecuador's coastline is punctuated by giant ridges of stone that jut into the sea, leaving long stretches of sandy beach borded on each side by steep cliffs, like lines on a geological measuring stick of Beauty. One of these extends just north of Montanita, with Olon on the other side, and as we rode past I noticed a chapel of some kind perched on top. A faded poster on the chipped wall of the hotel labelled it El Santuario de Olon, so on the afternoon of our day in town we walked up there.

We started on the sand, assuming there'd be a path from the beach up to the Sanctuary, but as we got close it seemed the wealthy have bought up every foot of beachfront property, and there was no gap between their mansions. Luckily actually building the mansion seems to be the hard part, so we crossed a barbed-wire fence and cut through one of the half-built ego-cases. (Meanwhile the town next door doesn't have a hospital, garbage rots in the street and on the beaches, and the school looked as cinder-block bare as I expected.)

The "stern" area

As I may have mentioned, I find a tidepool, a tree, the moon, laughter, etc to be holier than most churches, but the Santuario was impressive.
A lot of marble without being pretentious, simple wood pews, and everywhere everywhere, the sound of wind and wave. It was more like a chapel to the Sea than anything else in my eyes, the tortured man on the cross notwithstanding. We were the only ones there.

The Sanctuary of Olon is shaped like a ship, with the main chapel area on what would be the bow, and a second curved area of seating at the stern that looked well suited for personal reflection, gazing out to sea. Not bad, Catholics, not bad.
(It would have been a shame if the thing had fallen into the sea, the way it was about to in 2010 before they reinforced the sides in 2011.)

Inside the hull was a small grotto room, still reached by wind carrying the sound of surf, in which stood a statue of Maria Rosa Mystica. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the spare signage in the chapel (and some googling) indicate she is the version of the Virgin Mary who began appearing 1947 in order to urge some reform on the church, and to remind the faithful of her priorities.

She has appeared many times over the years, although since seven appearances in 1947, she seems to manifest only through her statues, which then cry, sometimes tears, but usually blood. The one in Olon apparently wept blood for several hours one day in 1990. Still not sure how I feel about the statues weeping blood idea...

Ecuadorian creepy-crawlies underfoot.

"Ventana (Spanish for 'wind') derives from the Latin word for wind, ventus. English window has a similar connection with the wind. It derives from the Scandinavian word vindauga, a combination of vindr ‘wind’ and auga ‘eye’. So a window is, literally, the eye through which the wind enters."
That has nothing to do with this blog, I just love stuff like that.

We left the tourist colony of Montanita behind to continue our ramble north up Ecuador's coast, aka the Ruta del Sol. We'd heard there was a sleepy little fisherman town a short ways up called Olon, so headed there.
"A short ways"? It was basically walkable. And "sleepy"? Try catatonic. I loved it.
First we played Goldilocks with the accommodation option. K liked the cute place with a permanent art exhibit on the walls but I vetoed the price. I liked the $5 place but K vetoed it due to the scraggly dogs lying in the dirt outside (and maybe the owner dude, who was rocking the international style of the wife-beater shirt pulled up over a big protruding basketball belly). The humble place around the corner whose sheets had actually been washed recently (this month) but whose room was just barely large enough for the bed was just right. Or an acceptable compromise anyway.
(Maybe politicians should travel together and learn how to compromise. Plus, it's hard to vilify someone whose hair you've held while they vomit bus station burek into the dingy porcelain receptacle...)

Olon has a looong beach, like a horizon close at hand, that lives with its eyes squinted shut against the relentless wind. The tidal zone is a metropolis of skittish crabs, entirely textured with tiny pellets of sand they drool-poop after eating off all the plankton, algae, and bacteria in it. It's oddly relaxing to watch them sweep up sand in elegant swoops of claw, moving steadily sideways in that crabby motion of way-too-many-legs, leaving new patches of clean sand behind.
As waves slide off the beach you can see either of two other species in their millions. The first are small snaily guys, slithering around like mobile pebbles. The second are frickin disgusting.

Some sort of filter-feeder, I think tiny crabs, they stick their arms out into the thin retreating water, and feel positively repulsive squirming under your feet in their thousands. I grew up on the seashore and her sandcrab attendants, but bleyucht! These things gave me the heeby-jeebies. To the point that I wore my sandals on the beach, which always feels a tad sacriligeous.
Wow, did I just talk that much about Olon's beach? I guess I'll leave the miracle and its dried blood for next time.

Why is the stink of feces such a common part of traveling?

With the sand of our ill-fated attempt at San Pablo still on our feet, we arrived in Montanita, arguably the tourism capital of the Ecuador Coast.

When we stepped down from the bus in San Pablo, we weren't sure which way to go, but there was no such doubt in Montanita, as one side of the highway was bare dirt and dried weeds, while on the other the ocean sparkled on the other side of three blocks of solid hostels, restaurants, and white faces.

In San Pablo our backpacks and flip-flops made us oddities, but in Montanita we were the majority. We crossed the highway into town past a pair of Dutch lads in fashionable hats and polo shirts who were discussing whether to go back to the hostel, or get pizza first. Pizza? Where are we?

Straight ahead was clearly the tourist hub, so K and I turned right instead, hoping to find one of the cheaper accommodation options that usually cling around the edges. We looked in a couple, turning one down as too expensive, one as too beer-soaked, and one as surprisingly unwelcoming in a country that has otherwise been so friendly (saludos don Gustavo!)

Carrying backpacks into and out of hotels gets old after the first half dozen, so we chose a modest-looking inn. As they led us around to our room out back we passed a drain somewhere that stank. My glance at K said "I'm sure glad our room isn't on this side!" Nope. Our room was out back. By the river. And by "river" I mean stagnant side pool clogged with garbage that is apparently never rinsed out and is full of the most pestilential-looking murky water I've ever seen, and whose smell makes the gas station bathroom seem like a caress of ocean breeze.

I got diptheria just from looking at it.

The room itself smelled of mold/mildew, with a strong second note of diesel fuel, but alongside the Septic Swamp outside it was...less gross. We closed the window and marinated in it. And just to make it really nasty, there was no water the entire time we were there, the sink and shower were ornmental only. It was like Tantalus, only grimy.

We dropped our bags and immediately went looking for somewhere else to stay the next night, finding three better options within fifteen minutes. The next morning we woke with the stench of the stagnant sewer-river in our noses, down our throats, and coating our hands and faces. We moved before breakfast.

After the dual initial shocks of the stank and the Spring Break tourism, Montanita turned out to be a pretty nice town.

We'd breakfast on fruit salad, yogurt, and granola in our hostel kitchen, then I'd work on a project for a few hours before heading out for an "almuerzo," the lunch special of soup, main, and fresh fruit juice for $2. The afternoons did what afternoons do, often with the help of a walk on the beach or stroll around town, then another couple hours of project work before a dinner of street food.

On the street with a dollar coin in your pocket you can choose between succulent-but-small skewers of various meats, a burger with a cardboard-thin patty of Grade F meat (70% grease, 30% tendons) with toasted bun and slathered in ketchup, or our personal favorite, an ear of corn on the cob, roasted over a charcoal grill next to you, then topped with salt or a layer of shredded white cheese held on by brush-strokes of mayonnaise. If you have $1.50 you can get a "burrito" from the cart on the end that is decent, despite bearing no resemblance to the beloved food-tubes of my homeland. (Burritos are Tex-Mex, created in America, and only barely trickling back into the Latin lands of the migrant workers who gave Uncle Sam his best meal since Jambalaya.)

For whatever reason, I only took three pictures in Montanita, all three of the birds who gather every evening in their hundreds on the wires downtown.

Montanita was a nice place, but wasn't too hard to leave.

Welcome to the Man Shack.

With the Ecuadoran sun overhead I wear my hat every day, and the Hat Hair was just getting too painful (for K) to look at, so it was time to get another haircut.

Ecuador was Haircut Country #10, which is pretty cool. I do so like them round numbers. The decathlon of man-tenance was completed in a 6 foot cube made of weathered boards whose blue paint was submitting to the elements at a graceful yet relentless pace. It looked like a storage shed you'd find in a train yard. Or the little box my old public high school used to store the hurdles in (after they stopped letting kids use them for fear they'd get hurt) that we walked past for three years without noticing until the door fell off during my senior year.

There she is, all closed up for the day.

It sat in dignified solitude on a dusty lot opposite the market. I found it yesterday, but couldn't get a haircut because the entire town's power was out. Again. The older gentleman barber looked up at me through his bifocals and shrugged. "Come back tomorrow."

So this morning, while the power was still on, I walked over, waiting outside while he finished shaving the jowly neck of a septagenarian who looked a bit like a Latin Ernest Hemingway. The gentleman barber himself had the calm eyes of a man who knows his trade and has known it for decades, watching the world outside his wooden cube change a little each year. When I asked his name he presented himself with dignity and formality, extending his hand with a smile at making my aquaintance. His name was Francisco de la Piedra.

I took a seat in the creaking wooden chair with black leather cushions just lightly cracking in the heat, ready to give the customary terse description, "short on the sides and back and a little longer on top." I always suspect I could just say "generic male haircut" and get the same, and today I was right. Don Francisco didn't ask, just picked up the buzzer and ran it into the hair on the back of my head.

Where it jammed.

Not sure if it's my hair itself, or the abuse of sun and salt it's been receiving, but my hair was too thick for his veteran tools. He adapted, coming at my apparently overwhelming head of hair in little swipes, a fighter plane reluctant to fully engage the enemy, sweeping off small pieces each time, though the motor would labor and quaver even still.

I sat watching the market across the street, where a stout fellow in a dirty apron carried a massive fish over and dumped it on his table with a thump and a grin. (The fish did the thumping, he did the grinning.)

Soon I felt the wind on my neck in that beautiful haircut freshness, and it was time for the scissors. The buzzer had barely handled my hair, and the scissors graduated in the same class, but Don Francisco managed. Of course, this being a Man Shed, he didn't dilly-dally around with any pampering frills like water, and the antique shears did a fair amount of pulling in addition to cutting, but the hair kept falling to the floor as he worked his way up to the top of my head.

I have long since come to terms with my British Hobbit heritage, complete with hairy feet and "modest" height, but in parts of Latin America my 5'8" gets me straight onto the basketball team. This was one of those times. The wooden chair scoffed at new-fangled upstarts that rise and lower, but I got the feeling Don Francisco was kind of approximating where the top of my head was as he reached his arms up over my seated form, scissors crunching.

In the market across the way an old woman sold a young boy a massive bunch of bananas, still on the stalk, which he hefted onto his narrow shoulder and walked away, though I don't know how he could see, much less walk under the burden.

Then it was time to tidy up the edges. I negotiated the line between relaxation and nervousness as he came at me with the straight razor held in hands that themselves seemed to be negotiating the line between assurance and trembling. I remembered Don Francisco shaving the jowls ahead of me and relaxed. Not much I could do about it anyway.

But he was flawless, and soon I was walking through the market with that feeling of invincible beauty that comes with a fresh haircut. I am sure all the market vendors watched me pass, the women with lust and the men with envy. I could hear my own theme music matching my steps as I strutted through the chaos. Women shoppers stood with plastic bags hanging forgotten from their wrists as they gazed at my passing beauty, and the young men wanted to do things to make me like them, wondering where I got that killer 'do.

Hat Hair decimated, cooler noggin temperatures, and an afternoon swagger. Not bad for $2.

Happy rebirthday, it's going to change your life.

When I turned 32 a couple weeks ago it wasn't a big deal, I was happy with a good navratan korma. But K's birthday yesterday...now that was a big deal. She turned....dumdumDUM...27!

Warning: my opinion to follow is a simplification/mis-statement of the "Saturn Return" in astrology, and/or the "sade sati" in Hindu Astrology, and/or probably other things, but you can please forgive me, and/or google those, and/or marvel at the transcultural unity of human experience. (I recommend all three.)

You're born. Your stars are perfectly aligned. As a child you just are yourself, and that's sublimely enough. You play with everyone, you eat what you want, cry when you want, and do what you want (within the bounds of parenting and circumstance of course). You just sort of wander around, learning every second (unless you're watching TV) and growing in every way.

13.5ish you hit puberty. My apologies. You pick a social archetype and cram yourself into it. Skater, Student, Artist, Stoner, Athlete, Hippy, Comedian, Beauty, Goth, whatever, choose your label and try to fit it, you poor tragic bastard. You play with those who chose compatible labels, eat what your archetype eats, and have whatever attitudes came in your prepackaged personality starter kit.

Personally, at 12-13 I started paying attention in school instead of entertaining my classmates, started running, and (hopefully) started treating people better. (I still owe a massive karmic debt to Blaine G, the kid I used to beat up in elementary school. I'm sorry Blaine!)

27ish (i.e. 13.5ish years later) you get This Thing. There's no arrival of acne, menses, facial hair, or any of that overt stuff, so it's harder to notice, but it's puberty 2.0, baby. Except with one major difference. Puberty sucks. This Thing is awesome.

If you're over 27, at that age did you start/end a relationship, get married, go back to school, have kids, start/quit a job? It's not everyone's path, and would be an oversimplification to assert otherwise, but there does seem to be a certain something...

For my part, I was a bit of a late bloomer, taking 27 to prepare, but quitting my job, dumping most of my possessions and heading to Europe on a one-way ticket early in 28 to discover this whole Traveling thing. Other cultures, places, and experiences. Homelessness by choice. The vulnerability and invincibility of the vagrant. (But that's another topic.)

Late 20's you STOP clinging to any vestiges of an archetype that no longer fit you. Peer Pressure doesn't influence your decisions very much (advertising and stupidity-on-a-societywide-scale are more topics for another day). You focus in and realize what you want to do, who you want to be. You can play with whoever you want, dammit, eat whatever you choose (significant difference from "want"), cry whenever you find it merited, etc.

Refreshing, isn't it? Let's go play football with the Nerds, smoke pot with the Students, and apply for graduate school with the Stoners.

But wait, there's more. Much better would be to divide each of those phases in the middle, and make it ~7 year cycles.

At 7ish I got a proper bicycle and began exploring the world around me with some degree of independence (this was the Good Old Days when we weren't as afraid of each other). At 20 I had fully left my childhood home and set up one of my own, entering into my first mature romantic relationship.

Increments of 7 do a better job of explaining the "27 Club" of musicians who die at that age; maybe they experienced that last phase so deeply and addictively that the tacit/subconscious feeling of its ending was unacceptable, or maybe unnecessary.

The Saturn Return of Astrology is about this, tying in to Saturn's orbit, though that takes 29.4 years (so yay! We're overachievers!) The Hindu sati sade on the other hand is structured around a circuit of 7.5 years. Darn those Indians, first yoga, now this? They think of all the answers. (Then forget them, but that too is another topic.)


To Sum Up.

Phase 1 (0-7ish): Childhood. You're a child, learning and just being one of those. Toys, cake, and swimming pools!
Phase 1.5 (7-14ish): Advanced Childhood. Your personality is emerging more strongly, in rough draft form, fits and starts.

Phase 2 (14-20ish): Adolescence: You diferentiate from everyone else...well, a large percentage of everyone else, anyway. Fun, horrible, exciting, terrifying, boring, exhilarating, and of course: confusing.
Phase 2.5 (2-27ish): Young adulthood. You have calmed down from the vicissitudes of puberty. Your perceptions, conversations, and relationships improve and clarify. Golden Years.

Phase 3 (27ish-?): Adulthood: You have figured out who you are and can make your own choices. The bullshit habits fall away. Your plumage is bright and beautiful. Congratulations, the music is for you. (Kinda makes me wonder what happens at 40ish. Gives more validity to the often-maligned Midlife Crisis, no? Maybe all those red convertibles aren't just about declining libidos and bald spots...)

So I propose a great Cosmic Toast to K, and to all the 27ish year olds (+/- 7.5 year increments). Happy rebirthday!

It's hard to escape the tourist loop.

After awhile you get kind of sick of following the guide book's path. It's a whole country, there must be places to go that aren't in the dang book, no?

The map in there shows nothing up the coast from Salinas until Montanita, which is Coastal Ecuador's top tourist destination, and whose description (in the bleepin guide book) begins with "there should be a sign at the entrance to Montanita saying 'you are now leaving Ecuador.' Such is the international vibe that you could be anywhere in the world." Ah. One of those. They are nice, but I kinda felt like more Ecuador.

So in Salinas I asked the maintenance man about the towns between there and Montanita, and he said there were a bunch, mentioning San Pablo in particular.

Two bus tickets to San Pablo, please.

The bus left Salinas and headed up the gorgeous chunk of coast known as La Ruta del Sol. As we passed through the first town it was a dusty heap of chipped cinderblocks and cracking concrete, stray dogs wretched with mange, and broken down cars rusting away to nothing on beds of garbage. It was Ecuador, alright. Yet I found myself thinking "I hope San Pablo has a little more than this..."

That's when the bus driver signaled to us. It WAS San Pablo. His look said "you sure you want to get off here?" K turned to me, her pupils dilated and asked, a hint of panic in her voice "do we want to get off here?!?"

This is actually in another town a week down the road,
but for some reason I'm not taking pictures lately,
and San Pablo was pretty similar, just a narrower beach.

Heck yes! We stepped out onto the pavement and the bus drove away, surfing the edge of a cloud of dust. K and I looked at each other, then at the four old men sitting on a bench under the sheet metal overhang in front of us, who looked back at us without expression, but without looking away either. Don't get many gringos in downtown San Pablo I guess.

There was a dusty hardware store, a couple shops selling potato chips and soda, and that was about it. But a block down beckoned the sea. The sea the sea, oh how I love the sea. So we went that way.

Around the corner the highway continued up the coast past a string of bamboo cabana huts serving fresh fish to automobile-equiped travelers. This helped me understand why the maintenance man would have such a positive idea of San Pablo, but we needed habitat, not halibut.

A couple hundred meters up the highway was a sign for a hosteria, which is a level below a hostel in terms of price and cleanliness, but it looked like the only option. It was a restaurant in front, and the guy looked surprised when we walked in, then more surprised when we asked for room. He paused, "we have rooms...but...they're not elegant." I liked him already.

The rooms were bunks, more like barracks for tired truck drivers than anything else, but they were clean enough, and I was ready to stay there when we asked the price. A long pause...a look at our clothes and skin..."$15?" While a good deal in the US, for $15 we could get a much nicer place, and not share it with any truckers. It was an option, but I was holding out for something better.

We headed farther up the coast, checking a couple menus along the way, just out of curiosity. Unsurprisingly there was not a vegetarian dish to be found, and the prices for a fried fish made me wonder if they came with the golden fish-hook still embedded in the jaw. I wonderd where people who lived there ate, then remembered the answer: their kitchens.

We picked out a piece of sand and lunched on the cookies, crackers, and raisins we bought in Salinas (never go shopping when hungry, no matter what country). The beach was long, slim, and windy windy with extra wind. A few stubborn Ecuadorians splashed around in the shallows, arms clenched tight to their sides, looking a tad miserable in the cold water.

We talked it over while watching pelicans and frigate birds overhead showing us the superiority of feathers to fur, and decided to head to Montanita after all. We tried hitch-hiking for a bit, but the only ones with room were too wealthy to pick up hitchers, but (luckily) a bus stopped, and an hour later we were in Montanita. Just a tad different.

Any computer wizards around here?

I don't know much about computers, but luckily I know a little bit.

In college used to know the keyboard codes to put accents over vowels and the tilde over an n. My fingers would do it automatically, and still, ten years later, 0233 just feels like an e, 0237 has something indefinably i-ish about it, and 0244 goes Oh! But on my trusty little netbook none of these worked, and when I looked in the character map, to my chagrin I found no sign of tilde'd n's.

Last night I made a small cheritable donation through a secured website, then accepted that couchsurfing friend request that's been lingering in my inbox for awhile, also through a secured website. Then I got an email from a friend with those codes for tildes and accents, and out of curiosity I tried them in an email. Unfortunately no effect on my netbook, but just to be sure I tried them in a word processing document too.

As I hit alt + 2 my screen changed to blue, saying "preparing for standby." First time it's done that, a tad unnerving. I woke it up from standby and it wasn't running right so I restarted it.

I entered my password as usual, then saw this:

I don't know much about computers, but luckily I know a litlte, so highly doubt pressing alt + 2 can kill one... But anybody know what to press to revive the dang thing? Anybody wizardly enough to fix a netbook in a different hemisphere?