Canoa to Puerto Viejo to Manta to Quito, with a couple of crybabies

The last seventy-two hours have seen us travel lots of kilometers by truck, panga, taxi, bus and airplane to four different cities and three different hotels. As you would expect, it has been pretty miserable - primarily because of the kids. They whine and cry starting from the minute that they wake up and lasting every second that they don't get exactly what they want.

That's not entirely true, but Rebecca wanted me to stop painting such a rosy picture of life with the kids on the road. Truthfully, I'm looking forward to getting home just so I can send them to Opa and PoPo's house for the weekend. We all need a break from each other. I really pity those parents that have to spend all day every day with their kids because they don't have parents or family nearby to ship the kids too a time or two a week.

While Maya and Jonah have been pretty good a lot of the time, they also make things so much more difficult a lot of the time. And while the ice cream bribe is still a 100% success in getting them to do what you want, I've been trying to employ it a lot less (it doesn't do mornings).

Below is a photo from our hotel room in Canoa. We really loved the place that we stayed - Posada Olmito. We really loved Canoa. Rebecca and I have recently seriously considered coming back in a few months to look into buying some property. We are certain it is a good investment, but didn't have the idea early enough to make it happen this time around. Plus, we had the kids with us.

One of the things we liked was that the guy in the below photo (wearing the number 11 shirt) delivered fresh bread to us every morning. He rides around town starting at about six-thirty a.m., honking his horn to let you know he's coming. Because town is pretty small, you can hear him coming for awhile. If we could actually sleep past six-thirty, it might be annoying. But, Maya and Jonah rarely make it that late. So, we'd always be awake. Rebecca and Maya would stand on the balcony of our room (or hang out the window), flag him down and make the exchange. He'd toss up bread and we'd toss down seventy or eighty cents - depending on how many loaves. Then we'd have fresh bread and jam. It was something to look forward to at that ungodly hour, at least.

Here's a couple of other photos of Canoa. In order, they are 1) the courtyard of our hotel from our balcony - looking towards the ocean; 2) Maya's photo of Jonah looking out our window and munching his morning bread; 3) a view of the beach and ocean from the entrance to our hotel.


Anyway, we spent our last night in Canoa (Tuesday night) much like we spent the previous four nights - partying. Rebecca discovered this Ecuadorian knock-off of Kahlua and we imbibed an entire bottle while watching the sun set over the Pacific with our friend Brian.


We spent a lot of good times with Brian and images of him will definitely be scattered through whatever brain cells we have left that have bits and pieces about Canoa. Here he is in digital.

After breakfast at our favorite restaurant in town - the Coco Loco (Maya and Jonah liked it because there were these two puppies there that they could play with)


we took a final walk around Canoa on Wednesday morning (accompanied by lots of whining from Maya and Jonah and yours truly (I was "tired")).
Then we hitched a ride out of Canoa on the back of a large rack truck that had four or five propane tanks in the back resting on a bed of wood chips. Nothing like traveling for free and in style.



By the way, say goodbye to that hat of Rebecca's. She left it on the bus a few hours after I snapped this photo.

Once we got to Bahia, we planned to take a $30 taxi ride for two hours fto Manta, but the other hitcher in the truck talked us into a more economical solution - a bus ride. It would have been great, however, the bus didn't go directly from Bahia to Manta - we had to first travel two hours to a dump of a city called Porto Viejo. To get to Manta we had to take a taxi an additional half hour and ten bucks. Add the ten to the $8 for the bus ride and we didn't end up saving that much. And the $12 we did save we promptly blew on an $85 hotel room.

The one perk to the hotel in Manta was that it had a pool. On Thursday morning (today, as it were) when Jonah and I went for a swim, there was some weird thing going on with this beautiful, well-endowed women and two men and a camera. The weirdness involved her laying around the pool area in a very small bikini top (do they make a thong for tits? If so, this was it) and a butt thong and the men video-taping her. When Jonah and I weren't swimming, we were comfortable in the shade eating sunflower seeds. We spent all morning at the pool.

Combine this free show with the free wireless internet that made Rebecca so excited, and there was a little something for everyone.

After a quick lunch, (where Rebecca also brought a panama hat from a vendor that came into the restaurant)

we made it to the airport in time for our flight to Quito. For the next two nights we are at a pretty cool place called "Posada del Maple". I'm sitting in the hotel common area taking advantage of their free wireless while Rebecca is probably sleeping upstairs.

Earlier she was talking to another family that is staying here that is two months into their year long travel through South America with their five year old and and two year old. They are convinced that they have the worst behaved kids in Ecuador.