MANTA, ECUADOR
Today, we arrived in Manta, the second of our planned stops in Ecuador, and our final port-of-call before we pass through the Panama Canal and leave the Pacific Ocean behind for the North Atlantic.
We were a little late arriving; something to do with being caught up in a bit of a traffic jam while trying to leave the river yesterday. It added about ninety minutes to our arrival time.
Once again, it was hot and humid (although there had also been quite a bit of rain overnight), and once again, we weren’t on escort duty (this is mostly because we haven’t volunteered for any here – in fact, there are no more tours that we’ve expressly asked for, but are happy to escort tours if required).
As with previous ports, there was a choice of shuttle buses; one to take you to the port gate, and cruise terminal; the other to take you into town. Since ‘town’ is within easy walking distance of the main gate, we, like many others, chose the shorter of the two options.
Once through the port gate, we turned left onto the road that ran along the sea-front. Not that there was much to see in the sea-front direction, until things opened out a bit, by the yachting club, and then there was an expansive view across the bay, which was full of small fishing boats.
Several blocks down, we came to a small park, which we knew of because we’ve been here before. In fact, we’d been telling Ian the photographer about it all the way there, and how we remembered it as being a park full of iguanas. Imagine our surprise, and mild disappointment, then, when we arrived there, to find only one iguana wandering about. This caused much speculation as to where the iguanas had gone to. Had we, in fact, got the right park? Had they moved? There did seem to be the remaining stumps of a lot of cut-down trees, so maybe their habitat had been iradicated in the three years since we were last here. Or had the locals just got peckish? (They taste like chicken, you know…).
After wandering around for a bit, and suffering the derision of Ian and his friend who was walking with us, a local took pity on us and pointed to the childrens play area adjacent to the park. Sure enough, after a bit searching, we found the iguanas… they were all in the trees. They were difficult to spot at first, but once you got used to the flow of the tree’s branches, the tell-tale spines along the backs of the iguanas started to come into focus.
We heard from someone, later, that they’d gone to the very same park after we’d been there, and found lots of them happily gracing the park, and making it a true ‘Iguana Park’. Needless to say; as far as Ian and his friend were concerned… we were vindicated… and duly forgiven.
After finding the iguanas, we went for a short walk through the streets of the town, and then gravitated back towards the seafront, where a rocky walkway led out into the sea. The area seemed a bit on the rough side, clearly frequented by locals, a few of whom were working on boats on the beach, fishing, playing cards, or sleeping in hammocks in one of the makeshift beach shelters. As I filmed a small group of vultures tugging at something on the beach, I unwittingly disturbed one of the locals who appeared to be relieving himself within the large rocks that lined the track, and who threw a large plastic bottle at me to warn me that he was there. As we walked along the track towards the tip which stuck right out into the sea, we became aware of another bay with a beach on the opposite side. On this beach, there were literally hundreds of birds, large and small. The largest were the pelicans, which sat quietly in groups, occasionally moving to a new position, or flying in on their great grey wings. Tracey was in her element.
We could have spent much longer there, but time was getting on, and all-aboard time was 3:30pm. We walked back to the terminal, took the shuttle back to the ship, had a quick change of clothes (because we were dripping from the heat), picked up our laptops, went back out to the quayside and took the shuttle back to the terminal, to make use of the free wi-fi there.
Sadly, the wi-fi wasn’t up to much. The terminal was a large hall, and there were lots of people sat around, all logged-in and using up the precious bandwidth. Unfortunately, it only takes one person to start a skype conversation, and the router will automatically give preferential bandwidth to that activity, at the expense of those who are merely trying to download emails, or update their facebook pages.
In the short time that we had there, I managed to achieve only a tiny fraction of what I’d hoped for. As three-thirty approached, I finally had to close the laptop lid and admit defeat. We hopped on the shuttle bus back to the ship; at just gone 5pm, we were on our way.
We have one sea-day tomorrow, after which we are due to arrive in Panama. I have a class tomorrow, which was to have been a view of Panama City, complete with ship in the bay. However, as we munched on sandwiches and biscuits at afternoon tea (because we’d missed lunch), I suddenly made an executive decision and dashed to the entertainments office in the hopes of catching Stephanie, the new Assistant Cruise Director (Josh has now left the ship to join the Astoria in Amsterdam, as Cruise Director) before tomorrow’s programme went to print. I decided, in light of the fact that we’ve seen lots of iguanas over the last few days, that folks would probably enjoy painting one more than a view of Panama City.
Tomorrow will now be ‘Iguana Day’.
