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.

All the Way to Pedernales

Tom had a couple of internet friends he wanted to contact in Pedernales, so we drove all the way from Manta to Pedernales in one day, not realizing that it was Saturday and all he had was work contact info. We made a few quick stops along the way, but all of these were repeated at length on the way back south, so I'll save them for later.

Pedernales is just north of the equator and I watched for some kind of indication as we drove north but didn't see any. Seriously bummed, I'm determined to find the equator on the way back south.

We arrived in Pedernales late on Saturday afternoon and took the first hotel room we found for nights 4 and 5 - at the Hotel Juan Carlos, directly across the street from the beach. This place was definitely mid-century shabby, but at least clean.

There's the hotel - the doorway right next to the orange storefront. We had the room with the open window just to the right of the restaurant sign.

No WiFi <sigh>.

The SIM cards we bought for our phones included data minutes, but I never could connect to the internet. I kept getting "Network Unavailable" messages. So then I tried to create a hot spot with my phone, but my electronics were having no part of internet connectivity. And when I rebooted my phone, it insisted I was in central Europe, even with GPS turned on, and added 7 hours to local time. OK. Two days without internet won't kill me.

The beach was jumping all of Saturday night into Sunday morning, but by Sunday afternoon, all was quiet.

We didn't go anywhere on this tour bus, just thought it was picture-worthy.

Fond memories of Pedernales include an old gent on a burro selling home-made hooch for 50 cents a shot. I didn't drink any; it smelled somewhat like you'd imagine rocket fuel to. I got to pat the burro. That was just as good.

The town itself is mostly agricultural with lots of feed and seed stores and even someone selling baby chicks on the street corner.

On Monday morning, we finally caught up with one of Tom's internet friends and then left Pedernales behind.

And I finally found the equator! We turned around and took pictures at the real estate sign on the northbound side of E15...

because the official sign, only on the southbound side of E15, is well hidden behind some lush greenery and fairly inaccessible.

Satisfied to have found the landmark, we headed south to check out beaches.

Heading North

I'd be remiss if I left Salinas without a picture of the beachfront condos (Holy Carlsbad, Batman!)

and if I didn't mention that our second night in Salinas gave us our first taste of the above-excellent service you get everywhere in Ecuador. We went back to the sidewalk grill for dinner, but they didn't have a table outside and it was much too hot inside, so they went inside, grabbed a table, and plopped it on the sidewalk for us.

I'd also be remiss if I simply said that we left Salinas. Truth be told, we went around the same block at least six times before we stopped at the local police station and a kind officer drew a map for us.

Montañita

Our next stop up the coast, Montañita. This is coastal Ecuador's party town and it was truly bustling on a Friday afternoon. I took only one photo, an empty bar space sure to be hopping by day's end, because it stopped me dead in my tracks I laughed so hard...

I also learned a very important Spanish word there - batidos - smoothies! But unlike your local Jamba Juice, they don't mix fruits; you get only one. Still, batidos became a significant part of our diet while on the road.

Manta

We spent night 3 in Manta at the Hotel Maria Isabella and liked it so much we returned on night 8.

Super-hard mattress and pillows as usual, otherwise 5-star by anyone's standards. Breakfast was delicious and the coffee was fresh-brewed - yay!

We walked down to the beach for dinner and ordered lobster in seafood sauce. Truthfully, it was not the best lobster I've ever had, but the service was outstanding! I ordered a margarita but they were all out would I like something else. I said no, never mind, and the margarita soon appeared at the table. I think they bought it next door.

And when people got up to dance, nobody told them to sit down because the restaurant didn't have a cabaret license!

The Tuna Boats

Before we left Manta, we stopped to see the tuna boats under construction on the beach.

And as lucky as anyone's allowed to get, Tom said hi to a stranger who became a friend named Miguel who has degrees in marine architecture from U Rhode Island and taught for a while and is now retired and "helps with the design" of the tuna fleet.

So with broad smiles we continued north up the coast...

Why Ecuador?

I always said I wanted to spend my retirement years watching the sun set over the ocean. And here I am, retirement age, living about 3 miles inland with a not very good view of the sunset and no view of the ocean.

Bored with the usual TV options one night, I tuned to HGTV's Househunters International and we watched someone buy beachfront property in Ecuador for $60,000. Oh! Maybe my sunsets aren't out of reach after all!

So we plotted ... and just returned from two weeks driving the coast of Ecuador. No hotel reservations, no plans, just two old hippies in a rental car. This is what we found.

Nights 1 & 2, Salinas

I have to admit, I don't travel well, so by the time we landed in Guayaquil, I was ready for a rest. We spent the first two nights in Salinas at the Hotel Marvento. We'd never thought of stopping in Salinas. It's just a convenient place to catch our breath and find our bearings.

The hotel is clean and modern, the water in the shower gets warm eventually, WiFi is spotty. The bed is hard; the pillow is harder. The key card for the room stops working and needs to be reprogrammed at least twice a day. Breakfast, included in the price of the room, was cold scrambled eggs, cold rolls, a glass of juice, and a cup of hot water with jars of Nescafe and Swiss Miss on the table for your pleasure.

In general, I've divided most of the cities and towns we visited as either poor-but-prideful or mid-century-shabby, and Salinas definitely falls to the shabby end of the spectrum. Sidewalks are in horrible disrepair. But the beach is wide, clean, and well cared for - and full of vacationers!

It was in this little sidewalk grill across the street from the beach in Salinas where I had my first (and second) taste of Arroz con Camarones. OMGYum! My tastebuds fell in love!