Hairy Negotiations

I didn’t make it out to the Discotecha on Saturday night, because I was exhausted! My dad, Carmen, Dwight, and his daughter Megan set out in search of some horses. The idea is to start a small horseriding business outside of the hotel. One of our friends said he knew of a guy, who knew a guy, who could show us some great horses to buy. We set out at about 10:30 to Bahia to catch the ferry. It is $.30 a person to take the ferry from Bahia over to San Vicente and they get their moneys worth by loading 20 people onto this small boat. Once you are on the ferry everyone just sits in silence and/or stares at you! HAHA some ferry’s have disco lights on them and play music, but mostly it is a quiet ride across the waters. WARNING: To those who get sea sick often, do not climb aboard!

San Vicente, Ecuador

Once we climbed off the ferry onto land again, we passed by a ton of vendors before reaching the truck we would be riding in. Sausage, queso, cowboy hats, veggies, pollo (chicken), horse saddles and etc… we climbed into the back of an old pickup truck where they said it would be another 5 kilometers. An hour later, we were still going! However, the countryside was BEAUTIFUL! Extremely lush with tons of vegetation and huge trees with white blooms and banana trees everywhere! We passed a few shrimp farms and picked up some Canadian hitch hikers on their way to go paragliding off a nearby cliff. I saved a perro from being run over as well. The dogs here LOVE to sleep in the middle of the road and as we know from my previous posts that when riding in a vehicle here you shut your eyes! I whistled and almost screamed when a car was about to hit a dog going the other direction! He got up in the nick of time and flew out of the way!

We pulled up to the first farm and out comes a 6 year old male horse. They wanted over $250 for it, which Megan pointed out is too much even in Canada . It was really muddy and of course I wore flip flops….I don’t know what I was thinking. The second farm we went to just had two horses and they were too young. The 3^rd No negotiations were made unfortunately. We felt like there was some hairy business going on, so we made our peace and left! The wind whipping at my face, the air cool and crisp, the view of the land so green and lush and my mind at ease, life can’t get much better than this!
ranch/hacienda we went to we had to climb down a huge steep hill and when we finally made it down there they told us they didn’t have any horses. AH! So we had to climb ALL the way back up! I thought the coastal regions were so quaint and peaceful, but nothing compares to these inland regions…pictures don’t even give the life here justice, but of course I always include some pics just for you to get an idea of what I am experiencing.

On the way back to the ferry there was a huge rush of people in the streets and then a man on a stretcher carried out of the crowd. It looked like he had a heart attack…but the nearest hospital was in Bahia, across the water on the taxi.

We had dinner at Porto Amistad, hambergesas con queso and watched as a 16 year old pregnant girl had a huge baby shower right there in the restaurant. They had a cerveza baby bottle contest, a blind folded feed your partner contest and measure the belly contest, What a day! Needless to say I took a well deserved nap on the way back to San Clemente.

Hasta Luego!