Justin McCandless

Yes, contrary to popular belief, this blog is capable of handling pictures. I ended up missing the Cuenca trip for a work trip to Huaquillas, and combined with finding a cyber cafe with SD card readers we now have Huaquillas in Pictures.

So I actually didn't get any pictures of Huaquillas itself (whoops), but I got plenty of my two trips from Huaquillas to some islands in the vicinity. So before I get in to that part of the trip, let me describe Huaquillas and what I did before heading out on the two other boat trips.

Huaquillas is a medium sized town in the Province of El Oro, in the south of Ecuador right on the Peruvian border and the coast. It runs mostly off of shellfish, crab, and shrimp fishing, though there is also a fairly large market right on the border that focuses much more on counterfeit US clothes than other similar markets I've seen. I stayed in a pretty decent $7 hotel room for my time in Huaquillas, and spent the little bit of free time I had walking around the market and the area around the main plaza with some Loja volunteers. And as an observation, as far as I saw there were no other foreigners there at all besides me, so I think it's a fairly out of the way place.

And last but not least, two things of interest I saw in the town:

1. A small arcade consisting of 30% old video poker machines.

2. Michigan hats being sold in the market, on two separate occasions. Heck yeah, Ecuadorians definitely know what's up when it comes to counterfeiting the right US college apparel.

Ok, now the rest of the trip. Here's Puerto Hualtaco, a port in Huaquillas where a lot of the local fisherman work out of. All the boats are like large canoes outfitted with motors, but there are a good amount of traditional canoes too. Here I was leaving in one of the motor ones with work people Ángel and Paola, as well as the 3 volunteers I mentioned who are from the National University in Loja, plus another boat full of elementary school kids and some local guys.

This is on the way to La Isla Seca with everyone. The whole area looks like this, though it opens up/gets narrower in some places. It's right in the middle of the Jambelí Archipelago, so there are islands everywhere and it looks more like a bunch of rivers or a lake than the typical ocean. The forest here is called manglar, and it eats every bit of land with massive tangled trees like this; there is hardly any real beach anywhere. Also, birds like the one in the picture are everywhere. I think they're herons. They sit in the trees and then all of a sudden dive out and grab a fish out of the water.

Here we had to go through this really narrow overgrown part to get to where we were going. The dude on the front would stand up there with a machete and hack away all the vines and branches so we could get through. As he's doing in the picture. Also, you could see crabs hanging out all over the lower branches and roots near the water. I got to eat one the night before by the way, one of the guys on the boat with me is a cangrejal aka crab fisherman and he has a restaurant that we went to. It was really good and tasted really different, almost sweet. Cangrejal Don Pedro is definitely recommended, if you happen to be in Huaquillas.

This is at our destination, in the bosque seco or dry forest on the island. The plant clinging to the tree is an orchid, though they're not in bloom right now. We walked around in the manglar and dry forest a bit, playing games with the kids and teaching them about the environment here.

That whole white mountain right there is seriously a mountain made of seashells. Every white rock looking thing is a big white seashell. This was a pretty crazy place, there was even a bunch of old ceramic laying around from indigenous people a long time ago. They are trying to turn this place into a park so it doesn't get destroyed, and so people can come see the archaeological/geological stuff. Right now it's surround by a bunch of more mainstream camaroneras aka shrimp fishermen who build big lagoons and stock them with shrimp.

And as an aside, I was sitting under a tree in the shade when I took this picture talking with the volunteers and one little girl who followed us around for a lot of the trip. She asked if we were all from Loja, and when one of the volunteers said that I was from the United States she replied, "Ahhh, por eso es blanco." That was pretty funny. And after all the kids realized I spoke English they kept saying "Hello" to me and asking me how to say things in English the rest of the trip.

This is the next day. We were going to La Isla Costa Rica this time, where there is a little tiny fishing village. The girl with the shades is Paola, the other three girls are the volunteers I mentioned, and the dude in the back is some guy who took us in his boat to Costa Rica. And the super handsome guy on the left is not a native Ecuadorian super shark spear fisherman like he appears, it's just me.

That's Costa Rica. We landed around the corner and not here, but the houses continue like that along a water inlet (during high tide) up to the beach a little farther. To the right a little out of the picture is a church, and that's basically the whole town. We stayed for a day in a house just like one of those, a bit out of the picture to the left.

This is the beach I mentioned, where we landed. There are a bunch of boats like you can kind of see in the picture, and this is where most of the fishermen take off and unload. The beach is slimy and full of fishing junk, but I heard there is a really nice beach across the way from there called San Gregorio. When I got back home I found a random pamphlet from Arcoiris advertising the area, trying to get people to come on a trip there with the money going to benefit the reserve. I'll bet the place the put you up in is the same place I stayed in too, so if you ever want to go on a trip where you really experience some legit Ecuadorianness then hit up Arcoiris.

Speaking of where we stayed... This isn't it. I didn't get a picture of the exact house I stayed in, but it looked somewhat like that minus the stilts, and I was actually standing on its front porch when I took this picture. That is the water inlet I mentioned, though when I took this picture it was low tide. That whole muddy area is filled with crabs of various sizes during low tide, and all kinds of birds trying to eat the crabs. Including a few cool birds that I think were ibises if I have my birds straight. We sat outside that house all day just hanging out and saying buenos dias/tardes/noches to the people who walked by (seriously, all day).

Then at night we went to a little soccer field nearby and challenged some little kids to a game. The teams changed a bunch as kids came and went, but it was mostly me and two of the girls versus a bunch of kids. I don't know what the people in this tiny village must have thought when they saw a big curly gringo playing soccer on thier soccer field. The game was a lot of fun though, and, ahem, we did end up winning. After that I chugged a liter of peach juice (the only thing the lady at a store nearby could find for me to drink besides Pilsener) and went back to the house. The house was mostly all open on the inside except for some partitions and curtains in select places, like the bathroom. I slept in a bunk bed with a mosquito net, which I was grateful for given the amount of mosquito bites I ended up with during the day.

The next day we caught a boat back to Hualtaco with two guys, some kids, and some fish. Then went to the terminal to start our six hour bus ride back to Loja.

This week I'm doing some cool stuff with the Arcoiris website involving automatic updating and things like that, which I'll elaborate more on when it works. And I will definitely be in town this weekend since there is both a graduation and a birthday I need to attend. I've been working on some minor updates to this site too between other projects, and I really should be done with that before too long.