Return to the Banana Republic
Trip Start
Nov 03, 2004
1
48
165
Trip End
Nov 23, 2006
Puerto Lopez, Ecuador
Tuesday, August 2, 2005
brutalist architecture where the colonial should have been and the
virus-like swarming of the yellow taxis of Chiclayo for three
draining days traveling to Puerto Lopez in Ecuador.
The traveling is draining because you are jammed into the buses like
sardines and everyone thinks it's cold so you're constantly battling
with the granny or the mother of the car sick child in front to keep
your window open. Whether you want them or not there is either a
radio, naturally slightly off station, blasting into the passenger
cabin (it is possible to "blast" pan pipe music) or a video (pirated
with atrocious picture and sound quality and incompetent dubbing)
blaring down the cabin. The movies are as grotesquely compelling as
traffic accidents - no matter your resolve you end up being drawn
into their vortex. We have watched (transfixed but ashamed) "Black
Beauty", "Deuce Bigalow - Male Gigolo" and that Martin Henderson
biker movie, "Bad Boys", in Spanish. The idea that children under a
particular age should not be exposed to Hong Kong shoot 'em ups,
exploding body parts or horror movies hasn't quite made it here
yet. The driving is terrifying. By general consensus traffic
mostly drives on the right but only on the straight bits of the
plains - around mountain passes, along bridges or on blind corners
it's obligatory to be passing a ute overladen with sacks of rice,
bunches of bananas, livestock and children dangling from every
surface. Most buses boast a speed restrictor at 90km/h, however,
the only vestige of this remaining is the flashing light - the speed
limit is as fast as you can thrash the engine. The drivers do not
take rest breaks and we're pretty much convinced that there is
actually no formal qualification required to drive - you just fill
in the appropriate form. Still, the driver does this every day,
it's often his own bus and he'll be the first one out the windshield.
We traveled from Chiclayo to Tumbes (back to the Roma Hotel as if
we'd never left), Tumbes to Guayaquil (green iguanas in the
restaurants on the waterfront hassling patrons for parsley) and then
Guayaquil to Jipijapa and onto Puerto Lopez on a "local" bus. The
woman checking tickets on the Guayaquil-Jipijapa leg conducted a
full body search of all the men boarding the bus (David says it was
VERY thorough) but the indignity of this was almost compensated for
by the fact that, in Puerto Lopez, they serve cafe latte in beer
mugs.
Puerto Lopez is a bustling fishing port. The one street running
along the waterfront is devoted to the facilities the gringos who
descend for the diving and the whales want and meanwhile the town
gets on with its real business. The local fishing industry is
mostly small scale with the boats powered by outboards and two crew
who manually haul the nets. The beach is none too clean. Pigs and
chickens forage along with the endemic stray dogs and parts of the
beach smell more like barnyard than seaside. We did stay in a very
nice hotel - they were obviously new at the hotel game - they
volunteered to move us after the first night because our room was
very noisy, they didn't charge us for our laundry because the shower
in our second room didn't provide hot water and they were surprised
when David offered to pay for the room key he had lost. (In our
experience a broken shower is certainly our problem not theirs,
noise is something that only we hear and a lost key would have been
a felony not an, "Oh well, USD2.00 should cover it").
You don't really come for the seaside resort aspects of Puerto
Lopez - you come for the whales. At this time of year the humpback
whales move north from Antarctica, following the warmer currents, to
court and breed. On a beautiful sunny day (something that is very
rare in the cool, dry season) we headed out towards Isla de la Plata
(where Francis Drake is believed to have buried a fortune in stolen
Spanish silver - it's never been found) for some whale watching and
some diving.
Courting humpback males spend the morning trying to draw attention
to their various superior attributes. This means, within metres of
the boats, they hurl themselves bodily from the ocean - 30 or 40m of
whale straight up into the air and then slamming down on their
backs. The sound of several tons of whale hitting the water in a
belly flop attracts the local females. The females, in turn, wallow
from side to side slapping their fins and tail on the water. Each
fin is about 4m long, when raised it's the only part of the whale
you can see and the white underside looks like a yacht sail before
it comes cracking down on the surface. After a bit of thwacking the
water with female appendages the males are inspired to throw
themselves out of the water again. It was a stunning, awesome
display. In Antarctica the humpbacks we had seen had been gentle,
leisurely feeders arcing through schools of krill and contentedly
blowing. This display was ecstatic, vigorous and primal. But, it
had its gentle aspect too - later, diving, we heard the whales
singing to each other.
We dived in the national park marine reserve off Silver Island. We
had had to pay USD15.00 to dive in the park which is a protected
area. So we were somewhat incredulous to see an industrial fishing
trawler moored in the bay next to the Ecuadorian navy. According to
the divemaster they just don't have the resources to police illegal
fishing in the reserve although just putting on the blinders and
pretending that a fishing trawler moored next to you is just a void
on the surface seems a little short-sighted from a conservation
point of view. Still, (although the natural environment generates a
lot of tourism dollars in this part of the world), coming from where
we do, it is easy to forget that conservation (just like municipal
rubbish collection) is a luxury product.
For all that the reserve may be being plundered of edible fish and
by-catch, the diving of Silver Island was some of the best we have
done. On the first dive we saw a greater concentration of puffer
fish, stone fish and moray eels than anywhere ever before. One of
the morays (just a common gray) was so big its gill aperture was as
big as my eye socket and I would only just have encircled it with my
arms. Everything we saw was familiar from our diving in the Cook
Islands and Poor Knights but so much bigger - king angel fish that
would have made a meal for four and a stone fish the size of a small
dog. There were beautiful mottled diamond rays and seahorses
resting in the Gregorian fans. - no sharks though. The second dive
was a nice walk in the park with the outboard motor soundtrack of
the whales serenading each other.
