To the sea

About half way into our stay in Quito, the Marine Ecology group which was in the middle of their Techniques of Marine Research class took a ten day trip to the coast of Ecuador. It started with 13 person, 7 hour half-full bus ride to Muisne in the province of Emeraldas. We were headed to the Congal Marine Biological research station and our rag-tag group was made of Luis, our professor, the Ecuadorian with the driest sense of humor I’ve met yet, Juan de Dios one of his students from USFQ, Juan Carlos, the bus driver, and the ten of us.

                That long of a bus ride can get pretty crazy with that many people in that small of space, but our descent to the coast was a sleepy one until we had a traffic collision on an unfinished highway going through Esmeraldas. The bus was fine but the car was pretty busted, No one got hurt though. Congal was a small building in the midst of shrimp farms, coastal jungle, beach, mangroves, and the two “towns” of Nuevo Muisne and Bunche. We arrived Sunday and stayed there until Thursday. While there we did research on the restored and old mangroves and also learned about the history and effects of shrimp farming and concha (a big clam used for ceviche) harvesting on the local environment and communities. The director of the station is a Swiss-Ecuadorian named Andres. He is very knowledgeable of the whole community and its history with the mangroves and a strange but interesting mix of cultures.

                While there are 7 wonders of the world, I personally believe there are certain things in nature that should be experience. One of course is the ocean with its vastness and powerful still mesmerizes me every time I see it. Mangroves are now on that list, and I think you have to get in them to actually “see” them. They look like alien tree spiders, more likely to turn out to be ents and start walking than to stay swaying contently rooted in the wind and changing tides. You can’t walk through it. At low tide you can see the ground, but that is just soft mud that looks like porous, black, volcanic basalt that you immediately sink 5 inches into as soon as you step on it. You can’t climb over it. The distance between the highest prop roots and lowest branches is more than twenty meters in the older mangroves, not to mention the termites and hornets that love to live in that region. You gotta go through it. It’s like a living jungle gym and a muddy adventure at every step.

                Until we got to the beach at Congal, which has blacker and softer sands than I’m used to, I didn’t realize just how much I missed the ocean. The altitude in Quito had been getting to me and I needed to see the sea. It was the second time I’ve been in the Pacific and it was superb, the water is a perfect temperature in Esmeraldas, still fairly warm from the Panamic current but chilled to a good temperature by the Humboldt. The people of the province we’re unique too. The look more African and this because of a slave ship that ran aground in the 16^th century (I think). They started to live with the coastal tribes and created a unique population in this province. After this we were off to Manta then Puerto Lopez!

I almost forgot Caimito and  San Francisco! In Caimito we hiked to a green house on a hill overlooking a jungled terrain and the sea. We had organically farmed shrimp, and learned from an old Argentine named Raul who had been a proponent of overfishing in Ecuador years before and now spent his time protecting the marine reserve saying it was his love and karma. He took us on a hike to an awesome secluded beach showing us cacao and mango trees on the way. There, we swam, had coconut from a guy name ChuChu and saw a mother humpbakc whale and her calf.

In San Francisco, we met a group of lobster fishermen who had made a coop to protect their exploited lobster fishery in partnership with NAZCA. They did their own policing and patrolling and were super excited about owning their own fishery.