Cuenca to Montanita

Thursday, February 19th, 2015 Montanita
On our last evening in Cuenca we ate dinner at Don Colon's and then watched a band play in front of one of the churches near Parque Calderon for a little while.
Yesterday morning we got up early because we knew we had a long day of travel ahead. We were in the lobby for the 7:30 start of breakfast by 7:20. Unfortunately, the breakfast cook was late so we couldn't start eating until 7:55. However, we still managed to eat, check out and grab a cab to the Terminal Terrestre (bus terminal) in time to catch the 8:45 bus to Guayaquil. At the Cuenca bus terminal, the bus parking lot is fenced and secured. To get out of the terminal to the buses, you have to pay 10 cents, show a ticket and pass through a turnstile manned by an armed security guard. For $8 each, we were on our way to Guayaquil.
After we left Cuenca, we climbed for about an hour through Cajas National Park. It's very beautiful although none of the areas of the Andes that we have seen so far are particularly rugged.

 However, we seemed to be above the tree line with only free range alpacas visible in the alpine meadows.
Soon we started downhill for at least an hour, until we finally reached the most flat land we have seen in Ecuador. On the west side of the Andes, south of Guayaquil, there are miles and miles of banana plantations, sugarcane fields and rice paddies.

 The diversity of environments in Ecuador is unbelievable for such a small country.

It took only about 4 hours to reach Guayaquil.
The Guayaquil bus station is immense and insanely busy. The bus parking garage is on 3 levels and there are well over 100 bus platforms and many companies selling tickets. However, we knew from latinbus.com which company we were looking for and after asking a few times, we found their office. Our tickets to Montanita cost $6 each, including 25 cents to go through the turnstile out to our platform on the 3rd level (2nd level here since they don't count the ground floor). Latinbus said there were buses at 1pm and 3pm but really there were buses every hour. The 1pm was full so we got the 2pm. After a quick sweet bun in the terminal mall for sustenance, we went out to our platform a little too early. Guayaquil is very hot and sticky compared to the highlands and the diesel exhaust on the platforms was a bit intense. Buses left from our assigned platform about every 10 minutes. Finally, our bus arrived but not at our platform. However, we followed the crowd and got on the right bus. We were glad to get out of there.
It took a long time to drive through the city. Guayaquil  is a port in a bay of the Pacific and is Ecuador's largest city with over 2 million people. Although the waterfront malecon is apparently quite nice, the rest of Guayaquil wasn't particularly impressive. We passed miles of slums and then, on the outskirts, quite a number of gated communities with nice houses. It's a mistake to assume that countries with lower income per capita than Canada are populated solely with people who seem poor to us.

Eventually, as we got closer to the coast, the landscape became very dry and scrubby. Once we got to the Pacific again, we passed through several shabby towns until we reached Montanita about 5 pm.
Montanita has its shabby areas but is mainly a surfing and beach party town composed of hostels, hotels, restaurants and bars. This is party central. The beach is beautiful; the town is super laid back; it's hot and humid all the time.
By asking a few people, in our broken Spanish, it didn't take long to find our hotel, the Swisspoint, just on the edge of town out of the party district. It's basic but fine. More about that tomorrow.

We had dinner at the Tiki Limbo and then went out to the beach to watch the sunset. This beats the hell out of shovelling snow.