Saturday August 3 – Manta Ecuador

We arrived in Manta this morning to find a tuna vessel right outside our cabin.  The men unloaded tuna all day, finishing their work at about 5:30 pm.  It was an enormous catch.  The vessel was very expensive looking with a helicopter on the upper deck for seeing where the tuna were.  This is one of Ecuador’s main exports.

We travelled by bus to Pacoche where we saw the local people making Panama hats.  Evidently, these hats have never been made in Panama and have always been made in Ecuador.  Many of the engineers wore the hats when they were building the Panama Canal and when President Roosevelt visited the canal during its construction he wore one of these hats.  After this they became known as Panama hats.  We saw a local making animal shapes from what they call vegetable ivory.  It is a nut that is very hard and as it dries it becomes harder.  They use an electric saw to carve the shapes and then they etch them with a fine blade and paint them.  Before plastic, these nuts were used to make buttons.

One lady showed us how she makes a local dish with chicken, rice, yuka and peanut sauce wrapped in a banana leaf and then cooked in an open fire.  It was really tasty.  We were also given a balonverde to taste.  It is a ball made with cheese and onions and rice and we enjoyed it.

Now, the unpleasant part of the tour began.  It was billed as a nature walk.  There was really no path, just a black mud track that encrusted itself on the base and in the grooves of your shoes.  This made it very difficult to remain upright and many people fell.  As a result their clothes also became covered with this mud.  It was difficult to observe any nature because you had to concentrate on your feet and where you were putting them.  After one lady who was coming back from an earlier walk told me that there was nothing to see except for juice being extracted from sugar cane, I gave up half way down but Bill continued.  He said he did not even see a bird, but he did see a mule working hard at getting the sugar from the cane. As we were returning to our bus, we did see howler

monkeys in the trees.  This area has howler, spider and capuchin monkeys.

Tonight we listened to the Princess band do a jazz session.