Puerto López and Isla de la Plata

click here to see the pics from my trip!

After almost 3 months here, I finally got to see some sights! Last weekend I went with Tasha, Christina, Jon, Caitlin, and Tierney to the beach town of Puerto López, a little beach town about 3 hours northwest of Durán/Guayaquil. Our buddy Wacho runs a taxi service, and he picked us up at 5am Saturday to catch the 5:30 bus out of Guayaquil. Wacho convinced us to pay the extra $2 for the scenic route along Hwy 1, and it was tooootally worth it. Felt just like cruising Hwy 1 back home! Amazing views of the Pacific, and we got to drive through Montañita and some other beach towns along the way. Definitely going to have to make it back to see some of these other towns!

So we got to our hostel in Puerto López around 9am, and were quickly convinced to take a boat ride (leaving immediately!) out to Isla de la Plata (known here as the poor man's Galapagos). On a volunteer's stipend, the real Galapagos just isn't in the cards, so we came to Puerto López/Isla de la Plata hoping to at least see some of Ecuador's most famous attaction. Instead of the multiple day, multiple hundred dollar trek out to the Galapagos, we each paid $35 and got more than our money's worth in one day at Isla de la Plata (which by the way gets its name from its history as a secret pirate's lair for stashing loot--plata means silver, or money). That included our admission to the national park, breakfast, a 2 hour walking tour of the island, lunch, some snorkeling around the reefs, and the hour and a half boat ride each way. Isla Plata doesn't have anywhere near the biodiversity of the Galapagos (honestly it's pretty arid and not much lives there), but we got to see a ballena (whale), a delfin (dolphin), some tortugas (sea turtles), and bastante piqueros patas azules (a shit ton of blue footed boobies). I took a bunch of pictures and uploaded them to the album above.

Oh and on our way out of Puerto López, we passed the morning fish market (apparently Puerto López is the county's biggest fishing port), which consisted of dozens of fishing boats unloading human-sized sharks and fish onto the beach to be trucked into town. Kind of disturbing seeing all these huge dead animals just laying on the beach (I assume sharking is legal?), but impressive at the same time. We were all so thrown off by the whole thing that I didn't even think to get my camera out until we were almost done walking through it all (click the picture above to see the album... I got a couple pics of some sharks and then some pics of the market as we were in the boat on the way to Isla de la Plata).

We got back from Isla de la Plata around 6pm, cleaned up at the hostel, and went to a little restaurant called Carmita's across the street from the beach. I finally had my first Ecuadorian ceviche, and it was DE-licious! I'm pretty food ignorant, but this stuff was great--an assortment of raw shrimp, fish, and other sea-meats in an awesome lime sauce with some garlic patacones (mashed then fried plantains) to complement.

Sunday we hitched a ride in the back of a truck to another national park just north of Puerto López. There's some pics in the album above and here's a map of the beach... I don't remember the name, but we practically had the whole beach to ourselves. We went on a little 30 minute hike up to a vista point where we could see the whole cove and another equally amazing cove to the north. After the hike, we just relaxed and enjoyed the beach before heading back to Guayaquil that night. Other than a few sing alongs that came on the radio that literally everyone on the bus except us knew, the bus ride home was pretty uneventful. All in all a good weekend, and I'm looking forward to my next trip!