Travel : Ecuador Part Two - Puerto Lopez

Life's a beach in Puerto Lopez

 Quito to Puerto Lopez

Save money. Take the night bus. Ok then. How bad can 10 hours be? Hmm.

We managed to find the correct (of Quitos myriad) bus terminal in the morning and purchased our $12 tickets for the 250 mile trip to Puerto Lopez. This was fortunate. If we had turned up at 8pm without tickets, we would never have got on the bus. It was full, and our seats at the front. Bags were searched and Liza's beer disallowed. Bodies were searched too by a young woman who would not have been out of place in the final of Miss Ecuador 2008. She spent more time fondling my crotch than any British customs officer would have dared. No drugs there my dear, but I am not sure you were looking for them anyway. Hmm. (It later transpires the search was for weapons - the night bus gets attacked and robbed with regularity, sometimes from the inside).

We left Quito at a fair pace. It had not occured to us why 250 miles was going to take 10 hours. We were soon to find out. Not far out of Quito the pace slowed. Being at the front of the bus we had an excellent view of the endless miles of trucks crawling ahead of us. Wood trucks, water trucks, fuel trucks - every f**king thing in South America trucks. As Liza said, it looked like the evacuation of New Orleans - except presumably this is a nightly occurence for Quito.

The jam was bad enough, the musical accompaniment far worse. Could not really blame the driver, he needed something to keep him awake. And so it was we were treated to a cultural lesson in Ecuadorean rhythm. For 10 hours. At Spinal Tapesque volume 11. But for the lack of a blunt instrument (an Ecuadorean guitar?) Liza would probably now be serving life. Yes, it was that bad. And it was to be our initiation into the extremely noisy world of long distance public transport travel in South America. A world dominated by potholes, bumps and repetitive, so repetitive, Latin beats.

After several hours and some suicidal overtaking we lost the last of the evacuees. And then the journey got even slower, for no trucks were crazy enough to follow the road we were now taking.
I use the word "road" loosely. 10,000 holes in Blackburn Lancashire? Nah John, that would be luxury. Add a zero. Or two. Maybe three. We are talking more holes than road. We are talking poverty economy. Real poverty.

Puerto Lopez welcomes careful drivers. Ok, any drivers.

The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round the holes in the road, round and round the random dogs and donkeys in the road, round and round the small children in the road, who, at 3am run alongside hopelessly trying to tempt the driver to buy their sweets. But this driver is not for stopping. In the darkest hour of the night we encounter a 'policeman' in the middle of the road, hand raised, calling the bus to a halt. But the driver doesn't stop, just swings the bus round the barely discenible shadow and presses on full steam ahead, full steam being about 20mph. Later we learn that the man was most probably not a policeman at all but one of the many desperate rural poor in Ecuador who hold up night buses for a living. Probably in order to raise enough cash to pay a human trafficker for an unsafe passage to America via the badlands of Mexico's growing drug war. It's life, but not as we know it.

Shanty towns continue to pass slowly by in the darkness. Extremely poor people with no homes to go to, or no shack worth going to, try, barechested, without success, to flag down the bus. But this driver was not for flagging (maybe if they waved CD's at him?). Immaculately, incongrously dressed in white tie and pristine shirt on and on he pressed, the volume of the music increasing as the rest of the passengers made futile attempts to sleepily anaesthetise themselves from the dangers of the desperados and the din of the disco.

I found myself praying for daylight.


Puerto Lopez

Some months back in the lap of luxury we call Llandeilo, our sleepy rural home in Wales, Puerto Lopez conjured up visions of a whitewashed harbour town, breakers rolling gently in from the Pacific while tourists bobbed around playfully in the water, their dollars providing for a booming local economy visible through improved roads, housing etc.

It's amazing what 8000 miles can do for ignorance.

Daylight finally arrived in time for us to see the last shanty town before Puerto Lopez. Please please do not let this be our town I thought to myself. We cannot stay here. And my wish was granted. It was Machalilla, gateway to the National Park. Edale it was not. And I will leave that one there.

A couple of miles down the road, down the potholes, we reached our town, literally bumping into Puerto Lopez. It was the end of the road. And that's not a figure of speech either. The bus took an immediate detour as the road disintegrated into nothing. And I mean nothing. The "road" we did take was no more than gravel and holes. Mainly holes. Better than nothing but still impossible to envisage National Express rolling their stock into such suspension-crushing inevitability.

It was 6.30am. Liza and I were the only people left on the bus save for our Ecuadorean musical afficianado driver. Relief at arriving safely, indeed, arriving anywhere at all, meant Liza's murderous demeanour of the last ten hours had dissipated, humanity returned. Instead of killing him Liza thanked the driver with utter sincerity and he smiled appreciatively in return. There has to be easier ways to earn a dollar. I doubt he was paid much more than that. After ten hours negotiating with jams, bandits and potholes he had arrived in the same pristine condition as he had started, shirt and tie immaculate. I jumped off the bus dusty, unkempt and feeling a bit humbled.

Can I have my breakfast now please?

 Off the bus, rucksacks on and straightaway we are jumped on by Moto-Taxi drivers (think rickshaw plus motorbike). "No gracias" becomes a common phrase. There is no hassle, the taxi drivers smile and politely accept our refusal. It's an early lesson in the Ecuadorean psyche I will come to love. It's not unusual for people, basic humanity, to be put before profit here. This will take some getting used to after a lifetime of western capitalism but I'm more than grateful to have the opportunity.

Off we trudge looking for Hostal Itapoa, though with no idea how to find it.

Humanity rears it's ugly head again. Ecuadoreans are so helpful, so friendly. You simply have to ask. A man on the street corner tells us todo recto, a la playa, a la derecha. Which just so happens to be the extent of my Spanish. Brilliant. These people have even watched the same BBC teach yourself Spanish downloads as me.

The town is poor, beyond any poverty I have ever seen (and I have been to Morocco). Houses are unfinished, largely windowless (an Ecuadorean phenomenon it seems) and there are no proper roads, just gravel and holes, gravel and holes. Everywhere is covered in dust and the shops only sell basics...basics seeming to consist of bits of metal you might bang together to make...something. There are few shops and fewer tourists. Indeed there are no tourists. Just a handful of travellers. Puerto Lopez is hard to reach and luxury-free, encapsulating neatly the distinction between tourism and travelling.

Hotel Itapoa is basic but beautiful, cabanas around beautifully planted gardens with colourful birds everywhere. And Puerto Lopez turns out to have an inner beauty of its own.

Neither of us have ever seen anything like Puerto Lopez. With its tumbledown shacks it reeks of poverty and happiness (oh, and fish). There are poorer places in the world, in the jungles of South America even, but those places largely do not exist within global economies. Puerto Lopez is a town on the coast of Ecuador. Ecuador is an oil-producing democracy of the world. Not one drop of that oil has been spilt into the laps of the people of Puerto Lopez.

I am not in the business of  romanticizing poverty. I am sure, given the choice, the people here would gladly swap their poverty for economic wealth. I am equally sure that for every American dollar gained, they would lose double the amount of happiness. People smile here, constantly. They are friendly, polite, helpful, communal. Human virtues that get lost with financial gain, with separation from the lives we were meant to lead. These people are not tainted by extreme greed and rampant commercialism. And it makes a difference. A difference that can visibly be seen. There are no playstations here. No TV's. Kids play baseball with a stick off the ground and a piece of fruit plucked from a tree. The kids are happy. The kids smile. Constantly.

Dinner