Esmeraldas

This last weekend I went to the beach with the other students from Central. We all talked with our host families and figured out what bus to take to get there. We left late on Thursday night and took the bus all night while we slept. The bus was really nice and had much more room than an airplane. By the end it did get a little hot because there were so many people and we had an extreme climate change. We arrived in a town called Atacames where we had to take a taxi to the beach. The taxis in Atacames were very different from here in Quito. Here they are cars and there they are motorcycles with a sort of like trailer on the back for passengers. I loved this taxi. It was so nice to ride in the fresh air and smell the ocean in the air as we got closer and closer to the beach.



The climate was completely opposite at the beach than here in Quito. It was probably over 80 degrees and it was humid just like in Michigan. The beach was soo nice, there were tents with chairs that you could relax in and the ocean was very warm with waves that were fun to swim in. During the weekend we got a chance to take a boat tour. We boated out from the shore and went to another part of the beach. There from the boat we came close to these cliffs where the boat driver showed us these birds. The birds are called blue footed boobies and they fly from the Galapagos to the mainland.



Also during our boat ride, the boat stopped and the driver let us jump out and swim in the middle of the ocean. At first I was a little hesitate because the weather this day was a little rainy with overcast and I did not want to be cold the rest of the boat ride,  but how many times do you get to swim in the middle of the ocean off the coast of Ecuador. So I jumped!



After the weekend was over I was excited to get home, I was tried. We got on a bus ride for Quito in the morning and this time we got to see everything that we were traveling past. Going through the mountains was amazing. Even though the ride to the beach and back were both 7 hour rides, it was defiantly worth it to see a different part of Ecuador.