Sadly, our week in the Galapagos with our friends the Swanson family was over and we settled ourselves into our seats on a flight back to Guayaquil. It had been a long day of travel from Isabela to Santa Cruz to Baltra. Everyone was looking forward to a week’s worth of downtime on the Ecuadorean coast.
Once in Guayaquil we took a taxi to the Hilton to spend the night, then we rose the next day for breakfast, picked up our rental cars, and hit the road. The two-hour trip from Guayaquil was uneventful except for a stop at a roadside “Coco Helado” stand so the kids could enjoy some iced coconuts.
We nosed our vehicles through Olon’s bustling, dusty main road. Local kids trudged home from school in their blue and white uniforms. Adults gathered in front of roadside food stands and produce shops to trade gossip. A mile farther on we turned into our address.
The development had clearly once been a ranch, with split rail fences and rolling hills, and there were dozens of horses still grazing on the land. Small clusters of villas dotted the hillsides with vast empty space separating them. Ours, Casa los Panchos, was perched on a hill deep within the ranch, facing west with stunning views of the Pacific and Playa Olon. No surf cams were necessary at los Panchos, we just looked out the window to see the rollers coming in.
The villa was a two-level, open floor plan home with three bedrooms and a pool. The house was clean and well maintained, though the pool could have used a bit of new masonry work and some love. The kids didn’t mind, though, and they jumped right in and started splashing around.
The town of Olon was a tiny 6×6 grid of dusty, battered roads squatting on a spectacular stretch of beach. The sand was wide and clean, and the beach sported a fantastic break. It was a surfer’s dream.
The larger town of Montanita lay to the south. A backpacker’s paradise, Montanita featured noisy and colorful streets, shaggy-maned and tattooed travelers shuffling the sidewalks, and surfers returning barefoot from the beach, dripping wet with their boards tucked under their arms and serene grins plastered on their faces.
Montanita also had a modest gym, Muscle Beach, that seemed sufficient for my needs, so I signed up for a month’s membership – $35 US.
For the next week the Swansons stayed with us and we spent most of our time relaxing by the pool, cooking meals together, or taking it easy on the beach while the kids took surfing lessons.
Three Mistakes
During that week we decided to go on an excursion and we found a fellow, Javier, who advertised local bike tours out of Montanita. What we really wanted was a kayak tour, and we told him so.
That was our first mistake.
Javier said he could take us on a kayak tour and told us to come back the next morning. We spent the afternoon lounging by the pool and the following day we rolled out of bed, packed for a day on the water, and turned the cars south on Ruta de Spondylus.
When we pulled up to Javier’s in Montanita he was there, waiting for us, and told us he had three kayaks waiting on a lovely stretch of beach. After we took turns kayaking we would have some lunch on the sand. Wait, we said, take turns? But we all wanted to kayak together.
That was our second mistake.
Javier looked at us for a moment thoughtfully, then said, “Ok, I can borrow some kayaks from a friend of mine,” and he eyed our rented pickup truck. “I’ll need to put them in the back of your truck, though.”
At this point we probably should have declined, but we had come this far and decided to follow the yellow brick road. After all, the experience might be amazing, and we probably shouldn’t let ourselves be deterred by a tour operator who called audibles.
That was our final mistake.
We jumped into our vehicles, Javier and his 3-year-old son, Juliann, Braeden, and I in our truck and the Swanson family in their car. He directed us across the street and down an alley to another tour operator and asked us to wait while he went inside. We hung out with Javier’s son for a minute or two, and Javier returned carrying a kayak with another fellow, a gringo.
The two of them (actually, just the gringo, which is important to note for later) deftly strapped first one kayak, then another into the bed of the pickup, and we were off. Javier asked me to drive slowly and I obliged. The 40-minute trip to the little town of Palmar passed quickly.
We turned off the main highway and down a dizzying array of cramped dirt roads until we emerged onto a sandy parking lot next to a marina jammed with weatherbeaten fishing boats.
The parking lot fronted a tidal river directly in front of us. The marina was off to the right, and the river emptied into the Pacific to the left where the parking lot turned into a beach. The beach extended south as far as we could see.
A small crew of locals was setting up a party tent with a couple of folding tables, and a few other guys were getting the kayaks in the river. The kids hopped out, kicked off their shoes, and ran to the river to get wet. We gave Javier and his crew an assist with the kayaks, and we had a look around as we shrugged on our life vests.
The first thing we noticed was the trash. This was clearly a beach for a working fishing village, and garbage was scattered everywhere, covering the parking lot and the beach. The kids noticed the many fish carcasses floating in the water and pointed them out with more than a little curiosity.
We quickly sorted out who was going in which kayak and we launched, heading upriver with our guide, who spoke no English but seemed a nice enough fellow.
The tour took us around a sandbar and through the marina, where we paddled silently past row after row of battered fishing boats and their crews. The men drank Cokes and picked at worn fishing nets, glancing up at us with amusement.
Further up the river narrowed a bit, and the trees on either side hung heavily over the water and provided welcome shade. Our guide took us upriver for 15-20 minutes then wordlessly turned us around to head back. We saw some frigate birds nesting in the trees overhead and glided past them, quietly watching the males attempt to dazzle the females with ballooned-up pouches under their bills.
When we returned to the beach Javier informed us that lunch – delivery pizza – was to be arriving shortly, so we amused ourselves by taking the kids into the surf at the mouth of the river and picking up trash on the beach.
The pizza arrived in a taxi and we hungrily ate with Javier and his son. Braeden sampled some of the oat milk that Javier had brought along, which was a thick mixture of oats, milk, and sugar that tasted a bit like a sweet liquid yogurt.
By that point we were just eager to get home, having learned that next time we should stick to tours on the menu. It hadn’t been a complete waste of a morning and would definitely provide a good story for years to come, but we were looking forward to jumping into the pool and taking it easy for the rest of the day.
Unfortunately it wasn’t going to be that simple.
After we finished lunch we picked up our trash while Javier and one of the guides wrestled the boats into the truck, resting one end inside the closed tailgate and the other up over the cab. Then they tied the boats to each other and to the sidewall of the pickup with stacks of square knots that looked like a third grader’s attempt at tying shoelaces. They jumped down and pronounced us ready to go, and I skeptically eyed the slack lines holding the boats to the bed, but I shrugged, figuring I shouldn’t question the experts.
We cruised slowly out of the parking lot and back through the dusty roads of Palmar. Javier chatted casually in the back seat as I turned onto the highway, and I kept my eyes glued to the kayaks that filled the rearview mirror. We crept along at 30 miles per hour, and we hadn’t gone a mile before I saw the boats shift heavily to the driver side, still tethered to the sidewall but leaning precariously. “Shit,” I muttered as I quickly pulled over to the side of the road. Javier spun around to look.
Check Out – The Galapagos Part I: The Gateway
“Oh, no,” he wailed, and he jumped out of the truck as soon as we came to a stop.
He climbed up into the bed, straightened up the kayaks so they were once again delicately balanced over the cab, and began fiddling with the lines in an attempt to make them more secure.
David emerged from his car and walked over to the truck. We exchanged a look. Clearly Javier had not paid attention to how his gringo friend had secured the kayaks.
Vehicles roared past us on the sandy highway. The sun was now directly overhead and it was close to 100 degrees. I jumped up into the bed of the truck and began untying, refastening, and tightening lines. There wasn’t enough rope. I had no idea how the gringo back in town had secured the kayaks, but I wasn’t going to be able to do a good job with this much line.
We did the best we could, knotting all the ropes and pulling at them to see how much play there was. Too much, we agreed, but we had little choice. We had to go on, as the kids were beginning to get tired and grumpy and we had been on the side of the road for about thirty minutes. The trip home was going to take a good two hours at this rate.
“Just take it very, very slow,” Javier cautioned me as we climbed back in, and I gently pulled the truck out onto the road. We slunk along at twenty miles an hour, David and Tanya keeping their distance well behind us.
Another mile down the road the kayaks slipped again. This time they snapped the lines completely and both boats tumbled onto the road, hitting the tarmac at twenty miles an hour. Fortunately there were no cars coming in either direction, and I swerved to the shoulder and jammed on the brakes.
We sprinted to the kayaks and hauled them out of the road. “Oh my god, my friend is going to be so upset!” Javier moaned as he ran his hand over a three-inch hole in the hull of the boat.
Again we stacked them in the back of the truck. Again we trussed them up and tested them. Tanya stepped out of the car and walked over to watch in frustration. Javier surveyed the kayaks in the back of the truck.
“We’ll have to stop somewhere and get more rope,” he said. We climbed back into the vehicles, hot, tired, and grouchy, and slowly drove on, this time at 10 miles an hour.
“Stop here,” Javier said as we approached a little cluster of run-down homes on the highway. “I’ll see if they have some rope.” He hopped out and walked over to a fellow working on something in his yard.
While he was asking for rope, Juliann and Braeden got into the Swanson’s car with Tanya and the other kids to head back home while David and I waited by the truck with Javier’s boy. There was no need for all of us to wait out on the highway in the hot sun.
Javier returned in a few minutes with a bale of thin wire and a worn-looking meat cleaver. “It was all I could find,” he confessed with a sheepish grin.
Check Out: Manzanillo and the Jaguar Rescue Center
With the kids safely on their way home all David and I could do was grin at each other and shrug. If it was going to be that kind of a day we might as well see how far this Theater of the Ridiculous would go.
We took several minutes to to lash the kayaks into the truck with the wire, awkwardly cutting it where necessary with the huge rusty cleaver. I immediately regretted letting Juliann and Tanya leave before they could take video of us climbing all over the kayaks while we wrapped them in wire. When we were finished we stepped back and surveyed our handiwork. The whole thing looked ridiculous, and any boater would have shaken their head in disgust, but the kayaks were now firmly attached to the truck and we felt pretty good about getting more than a mile before they fell out again.
The three of us hopped back into the truck. I kept the needle at 20 miles per hour the whole way home, pulling to the shoulder when traffic built up behind us. Javier and his son fell asleep in the back seat, and about forty minutes later we pulled into his friend’s shop.
David and I helped him cut the kayaks free and return them to the shop, we said goodbye to Javier and wished him well, and headed towards Olon. The minute we were back on the road we burst into laughter. We had made several mistakes, Javier had done the best he could, and we learned an important lesson: never Peter-Principle a Tour Operator.
The Swansons left Ecuador a few days later to return home to the States. We had enjoyed an absolutely fantastic time with the whole family and would travel with them again in a second.
One of my favorite memories is from the beautiful day we spent on Playa Olon drinking mojitos and watching the sun set while the kids surfed.
We knew we would all get along for two weeks on the road, but we never expected it would be so easy. WE MISS YOU GUYS!
The Final Weeks
Juliann, Braeden, and I spent three more quiet, pleasant weeks in Ecuador. The villa was comfortable and we hit the beach nearly every day, spent time together in the pool, I trained at the gym, and Juliann and I both got a bit of work done.
The restaurants in Olon weren’t very good. The food in Ecuador, in fact, didn’t compare well to other countries like Mexico, Thailand, and Italy (which probably aren’t fair comparisons) so we cooked most of our meals at home.
The surfing, however, was spectacular. We would check the surf report each week and plan our beach time around it. Braeden took lessons with the wonderful Matricio at Olon Surf School ($15 US/hour), I would rent a board to surf ($5 US/hour), and Juliann would chill out under an umbrella or tent ($5 or $8 US for the day, respectively) and read Stephen King’s It.
Mid-May arrived and it was time to return to the U.S., where we planned on spending at least six months figuring out our next move. Nearly two years on the road had been a joy, but we were fatigued and longing for friends, family, and a familiar place, at least for a little while.
We packed up, said goodbye to Casa los Panchos, and drove back to Guayaquil. We stayed one more night in the Guayaquil Hilton and started our long series of flights back to the U.S.
Next: Back in the States!
I’m writing a book! To join the party and follow along as I write, swear, and sweat my way through the next several months, check out the Facebook group for the book!
First of all, I love you guys. So much. Its difficult to look back on this trip because it’s not going to be easy to match. Second, thanks for not bringing up the lost car key thing. Lastly, I might of missed you mentioning us being abandoned by our wives in about 7 seconds on the side of the road. I think that was relevant.
So much love for the Blew’s (mostly Braeden). 🙂
Lol. I may have omitted some details to protect marriages. :^)