Wednesday, March 14, 2018- Cruise Day 50; Manta, Ecuador

Wednesday, March 14, 2018- Cruise Day 50; Manta, Ecuador

Our alarm clock woke us just before dawn.  Outside, the ship was still underway, but the coast of Manta, Ecuador was close by.  The sky didn’t look promising- moderately heavy cloud cover, despite a weather forecast for partly cloudy sky and sunshine.  As we had breakfast in the buffet we watched our approach to Manta’s harbor.  There a lots of fishing vessels big and small anchored inside the harbor.  Many of the fishing boats have Tuna towers rising 30-50’ above the decks of the boats.  Out cabin on Caribe deck 10 is about level with some of these Tuna towers.  The Holland America Maasdam is tied up on the next pier down from our pier.  Both piers are still under construction with a lot of heavy equipment, and temporary engineering bridges connecting the docks to the breakwater.  There are pelicans and enormous frigate birds  coasting along the jetty on the updraft off the water.  Manta appears to be a fairly well developed coastal town with a few beaches and highrises scattered along the coastline.  It has a population of just under 250K.  We are just 67 miles south of the Equator.  

The air is quite humid.  As we boarded our tour bus, there was a lot of condensation on the outside of the windows caused by the air conditioning inside the bus cooling the windows below the dew point.  As we drove, the condensation evaporated and we had a better view of the town and then the countryside.  The town is not a whole lot different than other South American cities- lots of buildings look unfinished with rebar sticking out of the roofs, and a lot of empty looking concrete structures.  There was a 7.8 earthquake just a couple of years ago that caused a lot of destruction.  Many people are still living in improvised housing around churches.  

They said that Ecuador does not have the rivers flowing out of the Andes to provide water, but they do have a rainy season that lasts about 3 months related to the Humboldt currents that provides adequate water for agricultural and other uses.  Once we got beyond the city, the countryside was lush green- a stark contrast to the deserts of northern Chile and Peru.  There are banana, plantain, and mango trees, and the trees have lots of large air plants growing amongst the branches.  We drove up to about 1000ft above sea level to the Pacoche Wildlife Reserve, which was the object of our excursion today.  While they had a nice sign off the highway, there was an extremely small gravel turnout that was supposed to be a parking lot.  It could barely accommodate 2 tour buses and nothing else.  We had to wait on the highway for a bus to empty before we could get in to unload.  There were also a few private taxis carrying cruise ship passengers.  

In general, it is certainly possible to do these sorts of excursions for a lot less money than Princess charges.  We paid $150 per person for this excursion.  The drive from the ship to the park took an hour.  You can supposedly hire a taxi for $30/hr, if you can speak Spanish, and have a mobile data plan so you can use your mapping and navigational smart phone apps.  But you have to deal with planning an itinerary, deal with the uncertainties associated with unscrupulous taxi drivers, unanticipated traffic or delays, and if you don’t make it back to the ship before all-aboard time, you could be left on the dock with a pile of your luggage hastily packed by your room steward and your passport.  Since we don’t speak Spanish, and are rather timid adventurers, we prefer the certainties of the canned tours, at least when dealing with non-english speaking countries.  Most of our trivia partners prefer to do excursions independently, and Kathy and John brought bicycles, and have bicycled through most of our ports of call for free.  

From where the bus dropped us off, we walked into the jungle on a narrow unpaved pathway that lead uphill to the park entrance.  There was a widened clearing with a couple of EZ-up tents set up around a power grinder and Dremel tool.  This was our first demonstration of local skills.  There is a palm tree that produces extremely hard nuts with white flesh that has been used for centuries for manufacturing buttons and other carved items because it is very ivory like.  Each nut is about 2”x3”x2”.  A local artisan took a nut and began to work it on the grinding wheel into a carving.  The first to guess what it would be would win the carving.  As it turns out, Janet was able to guess it was going to be a tiny elephant, and she received a free souvenir (not counting a small tip).  Under one of the EZ-ups was a selection of Ivory nut carvings available for purchase as souvenirs.  

We continued up the hill and made a bathroom stop.  The way they design public restroom facilities in South America leaves much to be desired.  In most places we have visited, there is an open doorway leading into the men’s room where a urinal is right next to the doorway, so anyone standing outside has to watch men urinate right next to the door.  In several other bathrooms, the sink is situated such that you have to reach in front of someone urinating in the urinal to use the sink.  And if a door is involved, whether a front door or toilet stall door, opening it will either fully expose someone doing their business to the outside world and/or completely obstruct the flow of traffic into and out of the bathroom.  In the ladies rooms, the toilet paper is usually mounted on a wall outside the stalls so you have to take what you think you will need in advance of entering the stalls, or there simply is no toilet paper.  And God forbid should you toss any toilet paper into a toilet, because South American plumbing will simply quit working and spill sewage all over the toilet floor if you put any paper in the toilet.  There was universally a huge line outside any women’s bathrooms during this trip on any excursions.  Less than 10% of the toilets and urinals I encountered in South American could actually flush.  Most just swirled the disgusting sewage around a bit as you fled the scene of the crime. 

It’s a good thing most excursions only last a couple of hours so you can head back to the safety and security of the tiny, but efficient and clean bathroom of your staterooms.

Anyways, back to our tour, the next stop was another set of EZ-ups around a clearing where two women were demonstrating how a Panama Hat is made.  The vast majority of Panama Hats are actually made in Ecuador.  They are made from a common palm tree in Ecuador.  The terminal stems, just below the opened leaves, are harvested and then shredded to produce uniform fibers for weaving.  The fibers are boiled, dyed if desired, and then dried to create the raw material for weaving the hats.  The value of the hats is largely determined by how finely and tightly woven the fibers are.  It can take up to 2 years for a craftsperson to weave a high quality hat.  The weavers have to stoop over a hat form, using their chests to secure the top of the hats as they work.  It made our backs hurt just to watch these women do this.  One woman, the master, looked well into her late 70’s, haunched over and toothless.  The other was a young gal in her late teens or early twenties, who was apparently the apprentice.  Our guide bragged repeatedly about how a friend of his sold a super fine Panama hat to Charlie Sheen for $15,000.  A decent quality Panama hat usually takes a craftsperson 2 months to produce, and sells for a couple hundred dollars.  It was impressive to see how intricate and detailed the weaving process had to be, and it gave us an appreciation for the amount of labor and skill involved.  But we weren’t going to spend several hundreds of dollars on souvenir Panama hats today. 

We made our way a few hundred more feet into the jungle where we encountered a mule munching on sugar cane, and just past him, there was another clearing with a mechanical sugar cane press in the center.  Our next demonstration was how they press the sugar cane juices out of the raw canes using the mule to power the sugar cane press.  We got to taste the juice, which was sweet with a twist of green grass flavor.  The cane juice is then boiled for several hours to produce dried brown sugar, which can be eaten as is, or used in cooking.  The guide said that when locals go climbing into the Andes, the frequently pack this brown sugar for energy.  In Peru, they would be packing dried coca leaves. So if you run into a mountaineer in Peru or Ecuador, they are likely to be buzzed either on sugar or cocaine.

We then did a loop hike down into the jungle and back out.  The vegetation was certainly dense and lush, but there was little in the way of educational explanation of the ecosystem.  We did manage to burn some calories and work up a good sweat in the 85 degree 85% humidity weather like a Hot Yoga workout.  The advertisments for Pacoche says the reserve is home to a large variety of flora and fauna including humming birds, howler monkeys, orchids and ornamental plants, but the only animal we saw for sure was the donkey.  There were birds chirping and singing high above in the jungle canopy, but you couldn’t see a single one of them.  There were lots of plants that looked like Birds of Paradise, as well as philodendrons and other houseplants gone wild, but we didn’t see any blossoming orchids.  

After we hiked out of the jungle, we were rewarded with a treat of some fresh watermelon juice, air conditioning, and a deep fried plantain cheese ball.  We were also shown examples of other exotic fruits including passion fruit that grow in the area.  That pretty much concluded our excursion and we reboarded our buses and headed back to the ship.  Three was no free wifi on these buses, so we just enjoyed the air conditioning and ongoing narrative from out guide on life in Ecuador.  

The ship will remain overnight at Manta, and a free shuttle service is supposed to take us from the ship to the head of the port terminal, which may or may not be within walking distance of the shopping district, fish market and museums (probably a few miles).  We headed up to our room to clean up a bit and then had a relaxing lunch in the buffet while watching the ship next door unloading truck load after truck load of frozen whole tuna. They were also refueling the ship by had with 52 gallon drums.  There was a truck with over a hundreds barrels that were manually unloaded onto the dock where a guy was manning a pump (fortunately electric powered) that would suck the fuel from a barrel into the ship’s fuel hold, one barrel at a time.  Seems inefficient some how.  I can’t imagine why they didn’t just bring a tanker truck down to the dock, but that’s just how they did it.  Fortunately, we generally get refueled from a fuel barge tied up to the side of the ship when we are in port.

We participated in the afternoon trivia where we met John and Kathy.  Roger and Bob didn’t show so we had a team of 4.  Kathleen and Ted also had a team of 4, and we ended up in a 2 way tie for the win.  The tie breaker was how many gallons of fuel does a 747 carry.  We guessed 30,000, while they guessed 2000.  The actual answer was 57,285 gallons, so we ended up winning.  We gave away the water bottles we won since they take up a lot of space in our luggage, and we certainly don’t need any more.  

After dinner, we watched the sun set from our balcony, and continued to watch the tuna boat being unloaded. It’s the same boat and they have been working all day using two cranes to pull what is probably a ton of fish per load into trucks.  There’s no sign of them slowing.  The must have had over a million tuna in the hold of that ship.  I makes you wonder about the sustainability of that kind of fishing.

Another tuna ship had pulled up behind the first one and fueled up using a tanker truck, but it didn’t appear to unload any tuna.  

We saw the Showtime performance by David Pengelly, who had an unusual but entertaining act with a ukelele, singing versions of pop songs from the ages mixed with jokes and gags.  He was backed by the Island Princess orchestra and he put on a worthwhile and fun show.  

Next, we headed to the Explorer lounge for a new kind of trivia game called the gift of gab.  You had to figure out a phrase from a scramble of words where the syllables were mixed up or a few extra syllables were thrown in.  An example would be Noose Pay Perry Port= newspaper report.  After the first two questions, a pattern emerged that most of the answers seemed to have a halloween theme (Bell A Cab At=Black Cat, Do Engine=dungeon, To Mob is Tone= tombstone) which made it much easier to solve the rest of the puzzles.  We ended up scoring 17/20 while the winners scored 19/20, missing only the black cat.  They won a bottle of champagne, but told Monique, the host, that they didn’t want the champagne and would rather have something else, so Monique gave them wine bottle stoppers.  Janet had gone over to ask what question they missed, and ended up with the unwanted champagne bottle because Monique didn’t want it back either.  

We ended up staying in the Explorer’s lounge because they started showing I, Tonya.  We stayed for the whole movie, which depicts a horrible childhood and abusive relationships with terrible people all around her.  It seems a miracle that Tonya Harding even had a chance at going to the Olympics with that horrible background.  You really did have to feel sorry for her in the end when she was barred from skating for life.  

We got back to our room after midnight.  The tuna boats had left and the dock was quiet, but the air outside smelled awful, like coal smoke, and some of that smell was permeating the ship.  It must be air pollution in the area.  We hope the wind will pick up and freshen up the air by morning.  We have another day in Manta tomorrow with nothing planned, so we’ll play it by ear.