Beaches and bacteria

Only 3 weeks left..ahhhh!

After getting back from the Galapagos to the newly rainy and cold Quito, I lasted about a week until heading to the beach again. This time, I visited Canoa, a beach about 6 hours away by bus. Since literally the moment I got off the plane in Quito, everyone had told me that Canoa was the best beach on the Ecuadorian mainland, and that I HAD to go there. So when a few friends decided to go for the weekend, I decided to join them to see what all the hype was about. Canoa was a really cool, tiny beach town and what I really liked was that since it was so small, all of the hostels were right on the beach—so no 30 minute trek like at other beaches. Also, one of the main reasons I went was to try and surf because it has the reputation as the best surfing beach in Ecuador, and for good reason…the waves are huge! So they ended up being way above my Wrightsville Beach surfing skills so that didn’t last long—but I did get some sweet rides on a boogy board :) It was kind of a bummer because it rained a lot even at the beach that weekend, so I only got a few hours on the beach each day—which I guess means I’ll have to make another trip back to get the full Canoa experience.

The Tuesday after I got back, one of my friends invited me to a “sweat hut”. My friend Mariana is from Peru, but she moved to Ecuador to teach yoga, so she’s all into that sort of hippy-ish cleansing rituals. Usually not my cup of tea but I decided to try it…why not? So we went to this huge house in between Quito and Cumbaya with a really big yard and one of these sweat huts out back. The idea is that you all go in to this really low mud hut and sit in circles around the center, which they fill with heated stones, straight out of a fire. Then they literally seal you in there, and this Shaman (like an indigenous medicine man or spiritual leader) starts chanting and people start singing and praying and you start sweating. Its like a sauna times a thousand, and you’re apparently sweating out all the toxins and everything bad in your body. Jesus it was hard…I’ve NEVER sweat so much in my life, including running cross country in Chapel Hill in August—it was unreal, and I was sitting in this pile of dirt that then turned to mud, and overall it was just a pretty uncomfortable experience. But hey, after pounding some water and showering afterwards I did feel pretty “clean”, and I guess its one of those things you should try just because you might not ever get the chance again. And if I do, I’ll probably turn it down.

And then the week got even more fun…I woke up Wednesday morning to a really bad stomach ache, nausea, and diarrhea, feeling utterly miserable. I knew I needed to see a doctor so I dragged myself on the less than comfortable 40 minute bus rides down to campus and went to the university’s clinic. They took a sample and after analyzing it, the doctor, who had been communicating with me completely in Spanish, looks up and says “ooooh, you have infection my friend”… Turns out I did have an infection, of not just one, but 3 different types of bacteria, plus 2 parasites which are luckily still in their “larval” form (basically laying dormant waiting to wreak their havoc later). The small drugstore of drugs they gave me worked like a charm though and after a day of feeling like I wanted to rip my stomach from my body, the next day I felt totally better…and good thing too because I had a 9 hour bus ride ahead of me!

Thursday afternoon, after making sure I felt 100%, I decided once again to head back to the beach. This time, we went back to Los Frailes, the beach we had visited during Carnaval in February, and in my opinion, the “real” best beach in Ecuador, especially since relatively few people still know about it. For 3 days we had the pristine beach completely to ourselves!