¿Do you have telephone in village?

Today is the 5th of January if I´m not mistaken, which means that Ben and I have been in Ecaudor for about 7 days, and yet this is only the first post of this long-promised blog, so there is some recapping to do.

Our current location is Montañita, somewhere on the coast of Ecuador. At some point I will consult a map, because I´m not sure where we are in relation to anything else except stray dogs (see forthcoming photo essay). I know exactly where the dogs are in relation to us, for they are everywhere. We´ve been in Montañita for three nights now, long enough for me to shave my beard, lose our apartment key and have nearly died in the ocean in some sort of tsunami which I like to call a riptide, but ben prefers to call a current. The weather here has been somewhat lame, in the parlance of our times, but we have high hopes that the sun will come out tomorrow.

What can I say about Montañita? There is one main street here, which quickly transforms from sand to mud during rainy conditions. There are street performers, bracelet-makers, mango-vendors, artisans, and hippie drummers on every corner and if I had a peso for every stray dog with enormous nipples that I´ve seen, then well, I´d be laden with pesos and nipples. Ironically enough the currency here isn´t a peso at all but rather the good old-fashioned American dollar, so I suppose my analogy is neither funny nor approriate. In any case, this place can be nice at times. It´s a surfing mecca apparently, though the waves haven´t been great lately, though the one that nearly killed me seemed to be a decent sized.

We´ve rented a room in a hostel 5 minutes away from the village. Mauritio, a nice ecuadorian, helps us out with clean towels and throws us a roll of toilet paper once in a while, and in exchange, we limit our hackey sack playing to daylight hours. We spend a lot of time on our terrace, plotting and scheming. We´ve managed to befriend our neighbors, a pair of California girls who love ben´s accent, I´m sure of it. They like me too though, so much so that they told me that a bird had shit on my shoulder last night, rather than let me find out the hard way. Thank god I had a t-shirt on underneath (you can never layer too much in 70 degree heat), otherwise I would have spent an evening with a little bird (shit) on my shoulder, and not the good kind of bird on your shoulder, the kind that gives me good advice and sings and shit.