La Playa y las Fincas

I finally got to the beach last weekend which was a nice change from the mountains and city. Although Quito is great it was so nice to be able to breathe easily again when walking somewhere, unlike here which just walking up the hill to my house makes me extremely winded still due to the high altitude. We set off for the beach on a night bus thursday after class and all was going great until about 2 hours in to the 6 hour ride when we stop suddenly in what appears to be the middle of no where at about 2 in the morning. While dozing in and out of consciousness due to my good luck of getting the only seat on the bus whose recliner function does not work so I am forced to attempt to sleep sitting straight up with my large backpack at my feet, I hear that there has been a landslide about 5 km on up the road and so we are waiting. Nobody, including the driver seems to know how long we may wait for since a crew was coming in from Quito in an attempt to clear the road. The bus finally began moving again around 6:30 ironically enough the time we were supposed to be arriving in Atacames. Although we had been told it can be difficult to find a hotel on the weekend in the beach towns without a reservation especially for 7 people we didn't seem to have any problem with attracting all sorts of people who "work" for different hotels and wanted to show us their top choices. We finally decided on one that was run by a lady, we had had enough of skeezy men at this point, and after quickly looking the room over went to the beach. Upon our return we realized that the shower had a very large window that looked out basically to the entire town without a blind, or even glass over it for that matter making showering, or more like a hose spicket is a better way to describe it, a very interesting experience. The beach in Atacames was pretty nice and the ocean was really warm but the people on the beach were of an interesting sort. As a group of 7 gringas we attracted far more attention than we actually wanted for most of our time at the beach. There were numerous occasions that parents came up to me with their small child of about 3 or 4 and asked if they could take a picture of me with the kid...this was one of the oddest expereinces I have had so far. I am used to men making comments and even asking for pictures at times (this also happened here a few times) but parents with kids was a new one. A couple other humerous but slightly awkward experiences that weekend include the time when a friend asked if I wanted to go for a swim with her and this guy we had been hanging out with that morning and one of his friends came along as well. As we get out to the water they tell us to get on this boat, ok this sounds creepier than it was but they were "tour guides" who did banana boat and tubing on the ocean so not quite as sketch as it seems, so we got on to go for a ride while they hooked up a tube. We rode around for awhile and then they got rid of the tube and we continued to go around for a bit and ended up out at the far buoy. Here they told us that we were all going to go for a swim, ok all well and good except for the fact that the boat then leaves and we are left to swim back to shore, at least the tide was with us. From here the story even gets better, the whole swim as I was feeling like I was going to be in the ocean forever, this guy, Javier, the one I had met all of 15 minutes ago goes on to profess his love for me for the ENTIRE swim. And to make it even more awkward I had a horrible time understanding him at the beginning due to his accent- on the coast they speak much more rapidly and slur the words together. Finally when I understood what he was saying I was like whoa, no i don't think so and after about 5 minutes of telling him I definitely was not interested he eventually kind of got the message and left me alone for a little while only to make an advance toward one of my friends later. Haha yeah guys here move a little fast and come on a little strong. After this I proceeded to fall asleep on the beach and get horribly sunburned due to my forgetting to reapply sunscreen- rookie mistake I know. My final awkward moment of the weekend was on the bus ride back when a random guy first just started staring in my direction and then finally he began talking to me and Andrea though it was extremely difficult to hear due to the noise of the bus and the loud fighting scene that was going on in Pearl Harbor. He started out with just the basics, where you from, what are you doing in Ecuador etc, and then he kept going to a point where he told me that my next trip back to Ecuador should be for Fernando (him) haha nice try buddy.
After our beach adventures it was time to meet up with our group for another one of the school sponsored field trips, this time we were studying malaria and other tropical diseases like Dengue and Chagas, something I was pretty excited to learn about in the context of Ecuador. Unlike the last school field trip there were far fewer hospital visits and many more visits to plantations that produced palmas (for palm oil), palmitas, and pinas aka pineapples. Yum! Although it was interesting to see these plantations and how the destruction of the primary forests that used to exist in those locales had greatly affected the climate of the area and therefore allowing for a better environment for mosquitoes to grow in, learning how to plant and farm these various products was a little more than we were expecting. After about 5 hours of touring these various plantations, not without a little excitement of course like a large poisonous snake (fortunately it had been killed by one of the farmers before we got there) being pulled out of the forest that they then wanted us to walk into to see how they pull down the racimos and make palm oil, no thank you I am good staying on the bus. We also were told at the end of the pina tour (after receiving 2 or more pinas apiece for free which later turned into some amazing pina coladas) that there was a great waterfall close by we should check out. Although it was close the path wasn't exactly easy with a wire bridge that had no bottom to it so it was like tightrope walking and another made of rotting bamboo that seemed a little to close to having that final bit of weight on it for comfort before falling into the stream below and the large tree trunk and jump to land at the end. After George of the Jungling our way through we all made it to the beautiful waterfall at the end and got some good photos ops. On the way back though I was not quite as fortunate. While waiting my turn to jump to the tree log bridge and standing at the edge of the mini cliff the ground suddenly fell out from underneath me causing me to land about 5 feet below in the midst of the swampy stream area which I was later told also had poisounous snakes excellent. Fortunately I was wearing my botas (large rubber boots) and so I was not covered in swamp muck but just dirt from where the side of the cliff fell down on me. This proceeded to give everyone a good laugh once I was finally lifted out to safety.
Much of the rest of our trip was much more related to malaria and the control efforts that Ecuador's public health ministry has implemented and have been very successful with. In the last 8 years or so they have gone from nearly 14,000 cases a year to around 10 or so a year. We learned a lot about the different methods of control used and even went mosquito larva hunting which consisted of dipping a very large ladel into a pond and hoping to pick up an anopheles (the kind of mosquito that carries malaria) larva. Overall it was a pretty good trip minus the fact that 11 out of 15 of us got sick at somepoint throughout the week, myself included, but all is well now and I am gearing up for the next couple of weeks in and around Quito before heading off to the coast again for Carnaval in a couple weeks.
I have posted some photos online via my facebook account and for those of you that don't have a facebook you can check them out here http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2053505&l=d6e41&id=32402831 I will try and get some more up from more recently soon though this week is pretty packed so far.