Off to the beach and boobies

After leaving Banos, drove on some pretty crazy roads, at one point we were on the highest paved road in Ecuador. The bus rides were pretty cool, but not as cool as the guidebooks made them out to be.

Eventually we made it to the beach town of Montanita...View of Montanita (from beach)

Can I say crazy. I was totally not expecting a town like this here on the beach. Total party town. I knew it was a surfing town, but I didn't expect there to be so much of a party atmosphere. we could hear music from our hostel room until like 3 am and then we could hear people up ina room above us til like 0630am.. it got a little annoying but we were super excited to be at the beach so it was worth it.

Surfers

By party I should say i think that it was mostly European tourist or something, most of the people that we ran into didn't speak english but they were white and not ecuadorian, we saw lots of dreadlocks, lots of hippy type, lots of surfer dudes and much more.

Cows hanging out on the beach

It was really nice to hang out on the beach and to be in the warm sun. Even though it was a busy town there was still a ton of beach there so you could just chill. We watched surfers and spent a lot of time just on the beach.



After we left montanita we headed up to the town of Puerto Lopez, which was a small beach town/ fishing town. It was nice to chill there and have a more relaxing atmosphere.



We then headed out to Isla de la Plata or the poor man galapagos.

We had to hire a guide for this trip and we headed out about 50km to the island( which is part of a national park). Once we got there we hiked around the island. There are only 2 trails on the island and one of them was closed due to a mating season of one of the islands birds.

so we hiked around and saw lots of Boobies...

Blue footed and masked that is. anyway here are a bunch of photos from that trip



Blue-footed boobies

View of cliffs along island

Masked Boobie


Wide angle view of a beachDid I mention we saw some turtles (they were awesome)