A Note From Miguel

The last few days have been busy with class, travelling and fiestaing...probably the highlight of the last few days was travelling to salinas, le lebertard, and chocolatera. Stephan and I met a lady named Lucia who´s house is above one of the clubs cana grill...she lives in guyaquil during the week and montanita on the weekend, and she also travels all over south america and has a place in miami..anyways she told us shed tour us around a couple citys near montanita so we went with her and two other local guys that are her friends...took the bus from montanita to le lebertard where the two guys lived...went to the habour and had an amazing seafood meal...it was all fresh because we could se e the fish and shrimps being brought in, la lebertard has a lot of buildings and is like a mini toronto, she said a lot of money is made there, she didnt like it because it was too busy, too many people and cars..i agree. then we went to salinas which is basically a long stretch of beach with hotels all along it...also a yacht club near by so thre were some nice boats. The interesting thing about this trip is that i had no clue where we were going because they would speak in spainish so every destination was a surprise for me...then we started walking not sure where but the guy we were with hailed a car over i think it was a cab and it drove us to chocolatear...i had no clue what this was, i thought itwas a chocolate store or something but i was wrong haha...on the way to chocolatera it was a beautiful drive...all along the water, but the police stopped us on the way, was kind of scary..we had 4 people in the back seat so thought we would get in trouble, then the police asked for our identification but stephan nor i had any..after a few minutes of the locals talking to them in spainish they let us go and laughed that we fit 4 big guys in the back seat...i thought we were going to have to go to the station because we had no identification on us but it was all good...anyways we keep driving and enter this military base with soldiers with guns guarding the front...after speaking to them for some time they let us through and we drove through many military men marching, and doing drills...finally we hit chocolatera...it is the most western land point in south america so that is why they are guarding it....it was cool to be on the most western piece of land though...the waves here were huggee, i took a ton of photos and videos but having trouble uploading them..all the tides meet at the point making it impossible to swim as well as the big waves...all the rock we were standing on was from an inactive volcanoe which was cool..we then continued on to a hotel on another point which had an amazing view...it was where lucias had her honeymoon with her ex husband..it only costed 40 a night and it must have been a 5 star hotel...anyways we watched mostof the sunset then droveback to salinas to grab the bus back...the guy driving us around only costed 10$ for 2 hours of driving and waiting, and the bus was only a dollar so for under 15$ say some pretty cool stuff...then we came back and had some drinks at lucias place and went down to the club after...had class on friday, then emily went to guyaquil but i was too tired, going to have some dinner now then probably head out to town....
that is alll for noww

mitch