Cuba Libres in Canoa, Again

We returned to Canoa yesterday (Saturday) after our much anticipated week on the Rio Muchacho Organic Farm.

The farm visit lived up to expectations. Maya and Jonah enjoyed feeding the pigs (pigs really do eat anything), milking the cow, riding the horses, gathering eggs (well, gathering the one egg that a hen left in the saw dust box by the toilet every morning) and being allowed to go to bed without a shower every night. They also enjoyed crying a fair amount and being carried everywhere they went.

On Friday, Jonah turned three and the ladies who cook at the farm prepared a great lemon cake with chocolate icing. It was decorated with these big fancy red flowers (that you could eat!) and Jonah was pretty much speechless. Though he did manage to blow out the one candle stuck in the cake pretty easily.

So, now we find ourselves back in Canoa after spending a week here before going to the farm, trying to figure out what to do for the last few days of vacation before we return to Quito on Thursday and to Virginia on Saturday.

Canoa, as a beach desitination, did not look promising when we set out to get here from Manta a few weeks ago. The taxi ride from Manta to Bahia was alternatively through banana/rice farms and mountainous desert several miles inland from the coast. The mostly paved, heavily potholed road was littered with piles of trash on either side and passed through hot, dusty villages where the people seem to make trade in loitering and selling coconuts to each other. Each time we managed to successfully pass a slow-moving truck or bus without being crushed by oncoming slow moving trucks or buses, our taxi driver would give me a thumbs-up. We liked him. We got his number so he can drive us back to Manta from where ever we are on Thursday for our flight to Quito.

As we approached Bahia, advertised as an eco-city and stopping point for many a rich, yankee yacht-owner, the piles of trash got higher, but the road did widen to two lanes. We took a panga across the bay to San Vicente (a panga is a wider, smellier version of a canoe. Until the bridge that is under construction is completed, panga is the only way across. I don´t know why it took until 2008 to begin building a bridge. I guess the car ferry was working so well, they figured, what the heck to we need a bridge for) and then hopped a taxi for the final 15 or so miles to Canoa.

Finally, as we approached Canoa along a mostly smooth road that paralleled the beach, things came into a better view. Here and there some nice looking habitaciones dotted the landscape, and the beach was a wide, undeveloped, masterpiece of sand and waves.

When we turned off the main road, we crossed three unpaved roads and dead-ended in the beach, and our hotel - Posada Olmito (I´d link the hotel website, but Rebecca said it sucks.)

I met an American shortly before we left Quito who had spent some time in Canoa a year ago. He described where the town ended (at the Coco-Loco hotel/restaurant) and was sure that it would be developed quite a bit to the South from there already. Turns out that the town has developed by about two more blocks - including the Posada Olmito. In a town that runs four or five blocks north to south, two blocks is quite a bit.

But still, the development is light years behind the over-development common to East Coast beach towns. Canoa is basically a main street that fronts the beach. It´s lined with ¨hotels¨, restaurants, shops, and bars. Only as you move further south do the places start to get taller than two stories. Most of the places have names like The Bamboo, The Surf Shak, Casa del Mar, Playa Bar, etc. etc. During the week the main occupants in town are gringo-surfer types. During weekends town fills up with Ecuatoriano´s down from Quito, mostly, for the weekend.

The beach is about a football fields length from road to ocean. It´s clean and safe and swimmable at low or high tide. In the morning, the fisherman come in with their haul of lobsters, crabs, and various fish (including baby hammerhead sharks!). We brought five lobsters (about 4 to 6 inches in length each) and two enormous crabs that we are having the lady who does it all at the hotel cook up for us tonight. She cooked us some lobsters when we were here a few weeks ago and it turned out pretty awesome - thus, the repeat performance.

Posada Olmito is owned by a Dutch guy that has been in South America for decades. The hotel is simply designed - eight or ten rooms on two stories around a central, sand courtyard. There are privtae or shared baths and showers. We got a private bath, but I end up taking all my showers in the public ones to keep sand out of our room, which turns out to be impossible anyway. I´ve never seen Rebecca with a broom in her hand so often.

Anyway, the hotel is a very friendly place - we basically treat it like home. We leave the kids playing there when they don´t want to cross the street to come to the beach with us. I walk behind the front desk to get whatever I want - which is mostly beer from the refrigerator. thw owner writes down our tab and then tears it up when we´re done for the night. It´s that kind of place.

Canoa is that kind of place. It´s the kind of place that when I was younger, I might wake up hung over five out of seven mornings a week. As it is, we´ve settled into a pretty easy routine of waking up, buying some hot bread from the guy that rides his bicycle around town tooting his horn to let us know he has fresh bread. We can lean out the window to our room and he´ll toss it up for us. Then we head to the beach until the breakfast places open up. After breakfast, we head back to the beach until noon-ish. Then we eat lunch. When the sun is out it can get pretty hot, so after lunch we tend to hide in the shade for a few hours until it´s time to go back to the beach to make a bonfire and have rum and cokes before dinner. Yesterday we shared our bottle with a few Ecuatorian women that happened by. It turned out to be great fun - though at two p.m. my head is still a bit sore.

Jonah has been totally into fires lately. He´ll carry a stick that he finds on the ground around for hours until we build a fire so he can throw it in.

Because the beach is beautiful, safe, and further development is coming, we have considered the place as an investment opportunity. Some local was dangling a beach-front, two-cabana property a few kilometers north of here in front of us for $40,000. It´s fun to think about, but we probably won´t do anything.

We did met a few americans here that we have also been sharing bottles and stories with. One guy, David, is mostly retired and owns property (he built a house here in Canoa on one lot and grows trees on his other lot, a few kilometers up into the hills), the other guy, Brian, is a pilot and has been here about two years. Since we got back here, we haven´t seen David and Brian is in Quito - maybe on his way to Greece if things worked out for him.

Anyway, because I am at an internet cafe, I can´t post pictures and I can´t write more about our impressions of this part of Ecuador or more detailed accounts/stories of the last few weeks. I will say that one night in Canoa I distinctly remember (but only because I wrote it down) Chris (one of Brian´s friends from the States who was visiting) saying, ¨I wouldn´t mind seeing if that guy has anything else besides corn.¨ The possibilities of what happened before and what could happen after someone forms a sentence like that are endless.

So to conclude, we are safe, mostly-happy, and outwardly healthy. The next few days may have us going to Puerto Lopez to get on a whale watching tour, paddling a canoe up the Rio Chone to the Isla Corazon to look at some mating frigate birds, driving up the coast to Jama to look at the property that is for sale, or just hanging out drinking cuba libres on the beach. We haven´t really made a decision yet.