And, after 4 years of traveling together, Kevin and I have officially experienced some non-ideal weather. Cue violins.
It Continues To Be Cloudy:
We have a day left in this sleepy little beach town of Mompiche, Ecuador, but we’ve yet to see the sun, except for a small sliver of hopeful blue sky hope that peeped out for 15 minutes, laughed at us and then went away. The spearfishing gods continue to smite us – after our failed attempts in Indonesia, the water here has been too mucked up by the rain to be clear enough to see anything – and the rain has also put the mosquitos are in a particular mood of insidiously mad.
Even with the grey skies, I am pretty sure Mompiche is heaven incarnate for a sizeable constituency lounging types who are perfectly comfortable hanging out in a remote paradise regardless of the weather, watching the tide roll dramatically in and out twice a day just 20 feet from their front porch, drinking dollar beers, never wearing shoes, enjoying lunchtime more than dinner time (Almuerzo rules the land here) and being surrounded by cute stray dogs.
To be completely honest, I’m personally getting little bit bored and wishing I had maybe booked us 3 nights instead of 5 – I keep half-hoping some giant parade that I don’t know about is going to march through town or that Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson are going to show up in the bungalow next to us (I don’t know why I always defer to them in my chance movie star-meeting daydreams) and that we will hang out together and be best friends and they will add some excitement to this cloudy leg of the trip.
Still, it’s been dreamy and pleasant here and we actually have discovered one of my favorite beaches in all of our travels: La Playa Negra.
La Playa Negra:
A 2km walk through the jungle, down a narrow service road and through a steep sandy trail full of horse poop, you get to a magical little enclave; 300 meters of empty beach covered in what is probably definitely Vibranium and also I lied this place is only sleepy because it’s obviously a front for the fact that we’re in Wakanda and walking on priceless magical metal. I’m serious – it’s unlike any other black sand beach I’ve seen. It is lead-heavy in your hands and shiny and shimmery like how I’d imagine dust on Saturn would look (is there dust on gaseous planets?? Whatever it’s my story not yours) and it most certainly possesses magical powers that I’ll work on uncovering tomorrow. The sand contains tons of mineral deposits – among others, manganese, calcium, silicon and wildly titanium – which give it its weight and color. It also feels like talcum powder when you walk on it and, if there’s enough rain mixed into the less saturated sand up toward the top reaches of the beach, you can feel it vibrate underneath you as it shifts underfoot. See, Vibranium! All in all it’s fun as anything to play in and I continue to ask to go back every day so I can run around in it and do childish things like cover myself in it and run around.
For the record, covering yourself in sand at a black sand beach and taking a picture is like pedal hopper beer tours – it’s lame and annoying when someone who is not you does it, but when it IS you it’s the most fun thing you’ve ever done. That’s all I have to say about that. And yes I do have pictures of this but you have to draw a line somewhere and just because my line is far away it doesn’t mean I don’t have one.
Adventuring to Isla Portete
We also met a local man today on our daily pilgrimage to the beach, and he greeted us by making us look up to the sun (clouds covering the sun, to be exact), rubbing our noses and foreheads with black sand, and then welcoming us to his “home.” Kevin went first and then our Italian friend Roberto whom we met on the way to the beach, and so I was a lemming and did it too. We wandered around with sand all over our faces for the next hour.
He also told us about an amazing island where you climb to to “take in all of life” and so the three of us hiked and scrambled for 45 minutes through somewhat dangerous tidal terrain and then when we got to where we pointed it was just a hotel resort spa with a different normal-looking beach and we had to walk an extra mile back home on the street to avoid the treachery of the trip there. We’re pretty sure he just sent us on the walk to make us go away so he could spend private beach time with the lady friend who was with him. Suffice it to say we’re alive, and we saw some cool caves and a lot of adorable crabs so I’d put us at a net-net.
In Conclusion
We’ve eaten a lot of pizza, we had a delicious chocolate cake the size of our heads and I ate four lobster tails yesterday for $20, so I’m going to give the food a solid 7.5 out of 10. We’re also discovering that the meals we order are probably meant for 2 people but we aren’t splitting them.
That’s all for now – back to Crazy 8s and reading and petting our new dog that lives on our porch and listening to waves crash at our feet before bed! We’ll probably skip tomorrow’s update unless Tom and Rita show up – more from The Galapagos in a few!