Tortuga Bay Part 1

Monday, April, 26, 2011:

To tell you the truth, I don’t really remember much about Monday. That’s probably because I didn’t do much… I lived the typical island life! Until about 12:00pm, I was just preparing for my Finance Academy interview, reading financial news, reviewing technical investment banking topics, and other things. I also was lucky enough to have the internet working strong enough to talk to Nicole. It’s been hard with the island internet to talk with her, but I enjoy every time I’m lucky enough to get a strong signal.

After our laziness in the hammocks, we decided to join the others in our group for the laziness at Tortuga Bay – the main beach on Santa Cruz. We hoped into a taxi; all the taxies on the island are white pickup trucks, so if you have 10 people, everyone can pile into the cab and into the back as well. Although, there were only 4 of us, so we all fit into the covered part. We got there and I definitely was not expecting to have to walk for about 20 minutes from the “entrance” of the beach to actually get to the beach. You walk this sidewalk width stone path that weaves through the cactus forest in order to get to the ocean front. It was very very tropical if you can imagine cactus as being tropical – they are in the Galapagos. It was weird because there were like cactus trees; trees on the bottom, but instead of leaves, there were cactus at the top.

We finally got to the ocean front after our trek, and it was a site for sore eyes. Layers and layers of waves were collapsing over each other. We didn’t stay at this one though because it’s a bit dangerous with a lot of undertow, currents, and things of that sort. So we walked another 15 minutes down the ocean front to another more calm beach where we met up with the 4 girls in our group who left earlier. We spent about 2 hours there, just sitting in the water talking and playing with the perfectly white and strangely intriguing grey sand. The sand was like the sand that’s artificially made that gets put into those hour glasses.

As soon as the clouds came overhead, we headed back for the full hour walk in all. I was exhausted by the time we got back. This is why there is no need to do cardio work in Ecuador. The walking does enough… The rest of the day just consisted of getting dinner and ice-cream in front of the pescador (place where the fisherman bring their fish to filet and sell).

I’m slowly but surely liking this island life – aka do nothing life.

Ciao,

Michael