Hooray for Boobies!

On Monday I took a trip out to Isla de La Plata, also known as ¨poor man´s Galapagos¨. For those that don´t know, a trip to the Galapagos is pretty expensive, the cheapest you can do it including airfare to the island from Quito is about $1200 for a four day trip. From Puerto Lopez, an hour north of Montanita, I took a boat trip to Isla de La Plata. It also has the boobies that you find on the Galapagos, the frigate birds and the semi-endagered Albatross (who can sleep while flying).


The boobies will sit together on their nest and not even move, which is good for pictures but one also needs to be considerate that they are still intimidated by us. Any boobie that was seen sitting by himself was a male sitting around hoping a female would show up. They also take turns getting food when the chicks have hatched, how very modern. I´m not normally much of a bird person but this was something different to check out.


On the way there and back we saw humpback whales which migrate through between July and September. They are such amazing creatures, it is just not something someone could tire of. I mean after seeing all those boobies I was like ok, another pair of boobies, big deal. But watching the whales, especially when they breached, was spectacular.

Yesterday I took a bus ride from Montanita all the way up to Canoa which is due west of Quito on the coast. Canoa is a small little beach village with a couple of surf side bars and hostals in the form of beach shacks. It is very tranquil with travellers that just happened upon it like I did. I will either stay here for a few days or move farther north up the coast to Mompiche, another beach town, before heading to Quito to find an organized jungle tour in eastern Ecuador( a.k.a. ¨the Oriente¨). I love the laid-back beach lifestyle here, the only drawback being that the Internet connection matches the pace of life-super slow!