Volunteering Spot

Montañita, Manabi, Ecuador

So we safely made it to the volunteering spot which was quite an experience. The guide books we read said the trip from Quevedo to Puerto Lopez was not a common one and we now know why. The road up the mountain was fine and not too bad but once we started going down we descended into the a fog and went from about 13,000 ft to 1,000 ft in about 3 hours on muddy roads (i think i still have nail marks from Jess in my arm). Anyways everything was fine and we made it to Puerto Lopez after about 6 hours of busing around that day so we were pretty beat. We stayed at the closest hostel to the bus station which seems like a great idea at the time but we could have done better if we had looked around some. The town is nice and basically revolves around tourists, which was a huge change from Quevedo where we were the only tourists in the whole city.

We decided to relax in Puerto Lopez the night instead of heading straight to our volunteering spot. We met a local that ran whale watches who name was Winston Churchill. I think i laughed at him the first few times he said his name until i figured out he was serious, but i guess its common for some people to have names of famous people. Anyways he brought out his log book of guest he had taken out and decided to read off where all his passengers had been from looking for people that were from Boston, which there were none. Then he proceeded to tell Jess and I that whales around here were much bigger than our whales on the east coast. He was nice guy though and if anyone goes to Puerto Lopez look him up and he´ll hook you up with a deal.

Anyways we arrived the next day at Alandaluz where we thought we are going to be volunteering. Jess and I were really excited to be right on the beach and doing some work to help out the local community and learn some other interesting things about the local ecology. We´ll that wasnt the case... It turns out we are volunteering for a for profit psuedo-eco hotel satellite farming facility... Not cool. This place, Cantalapiedra, is used to support Alandaluz by growing various crops and bamboo that are many brought to Alandaluz. No Tourists stay there, they only come for Canopy tours which is just a set of 4 zip lines that are strung over the grounds. I think we would have been happy if we were giving Canopy tours but we are used as unskilled labor doing random mindless tasks. If you want to hear me rant more just email me and ill give you the goods but needless to say Jess and I will only be staying till this friday. The only reason were staying is because the other volunteers are cool and our spanish is getting a lot better.

Next week were planning on coming back to Montañita to figure out more of out trip and our next spot. We have added a couple of pipe dream places to the map so check that out. And Jess added some caption to her picture (picts 1... i think). Anyways i hope people are enjoying these posting and feel free to post some stuff up. I hope we´ll have pictures of the volunteering place next week. Until then

Best

Justin

ps our volunteering place is in the middle of nowhere so no more email or blog til this weekend.