Falling in Love with San Clemente

We'd found a really nice little neighborhood in San Jacinto on the way to Pedernales and wanted to investigate the San Clemente/San Jacinto area more closely on the way south. The big yellow and green house is for sale, but I don't know the price.

So we stopped in San Clemente for lunch and then started to drive around.

(You can tell a lot about a place by the way they treat their shrine. San Clemente's virgin display is open and elegant. Some towns have so many bars and padlocks on their shrines you can hardly tell who's in there!)

We hadn't gone far when we heard, "Excuse me! Are you lost? Can I help you?" and that's when Pablo took us under his wing. He guided us to the Macedonia Hotel in San Clemente where we stayed for nights 6 and 7.

I don't think the hotel was actually open. We were the only guests. The maintenance guy and housekeeping lady came by every day, but we didn't meet anyone to take our money until we were ready to leave. That said, the room was definitely 5-star -- modern, clean, elegant, and spacious with a refrigerator and a great pool!

view from our room's balcony

awesome pool

view from the rooftop

And someone related to the hotel's housekeeper did our laundry.

That evening, Pablo drove us past another beachfront property (in the dark, so I didn't get a photo) - awesome brand new 2 story 2 bedroom beachfront for $120,000 and then we went to his favorite restaurant for dinner.

We spent the next day relaxing and walking around town. 

condos under construction

3 broken chairs and a board make a good bench

Down by the beach...

This gent was making logs into boat rollers using a machete and a straight metal rod.

Each boat roller has rope attached to the ends. When they move the fishing boats around, they drag a boat onto 3 or 4 rollers and push it to where they want it to go. When it rolls off the back roller, somebody runs back, grabs the roller by the rope, and throws it under the front of the boat to keep it rolling. Whew!

And turning around, we met this fisherman (and if you look between the fisherman and the post, you'll see the boat is resting on a single boat roller).

Even with my limited Spanish, I understood...

My family has lived here for over 30 years and its a safe and peaceful place to live and life is good. But what I don't understand is this house behind you. That big house and only one person lives there - from the United States. Why does one person need that big house? And it's full of stuff! For one person!

I didn't really have an answer for him in English or Spanish.

And then we walked on the beach...

While the town looks like the perfect place to settle in, the beaches are less so. They are not really walkable, more beaches for people who want to sit and watch the ocean. They are narrow and completely disappear at high tide. They're short - 200 to 300 yards at most. And there's a seawall of rocks and debris to be conquered to get there.

So with our stay in Ecuador half over, we headed south to Manta.