22 December 2013 Bahia de Caraques, Ecuador
My legs were stiff and aching this morning, so I did some light stretching and didn't go running – the last thing that I want is to injure myself.
Our friends Chris and Anne from “Mr Mac” sent us an e-Christmas card, which made me realise that there’s only three sleeps to Christmas Day and we haven’t sent out any Christmas emails. It took me a couple of hours to find a Photoshop template for our e-Christmas Card and merge it with my favourite photo from 2013. Once I had the card made, we then had to write and send out a hundred or so emails to family and friends, which took most of the day.
In the evening, all the cruisers met up in the marina restaurant for sun-downers. The restaurant is closed on Sundays, so Tripp and his wife are happy for us to make use of the tables and chairs. People from ten boats attended, so it was a good session. Every one brought some nibbles and there was a good selection of food – I particularly liked the hard-boiled Quails Eggs that somebody bought in town for $0.10 each (cooked and peeled). Apparently, quails eggs are a popular snack here in Ecuador – I’ll be keeping my eye out for them in the market.
23 December 2013 Bahia de Caraques, Ecuador
Only two sleeps until Christmas. I went running this morning again. My legs were aching for the first five minutes, but I paced myself and managed to run the route and then 100 metres up the hill. That’s 10% of my goal. The rest of the day was spent running errands and doing small jobs.
In the afternoon, we walked into town to do some shopping. It was heaving with people rushing around doing their last minute Christmas shopping – just like everywhere else in the world. Glenys and I have agreed that we’re only allowed to spend $10 on presents for each other mostly because we've already got too much stuff on the boat, so we split up and went off to find our gifts. I did quite well, spending exactly $10 on four presents.
We had lunch in one of the restaurants on the sea front, which was a very filling Almuerzo Tipico for $3 each. We then went food shopping and by the time that we’d got back to the boat it was mid-afternoon and too late to start any serious jobs – oh well!
24 December 2013 Bahia de Caraques, Ecuador
Being Christmas Eve, I had a rest from running. Charlotte from “Salamander” came over and told us that there’s a 4 kilometre run in town on the 28th December, so I've entered both of us. This will be a bit of a shock for Glenys’ body because she hasn't been running for nearly two years
I ran some wiring through the aft lazarette to change the antenna cable for the SSB radio and also to provide 12V power to the tiller pilot for the Hydrovane. It all went pretty well although it’s very claustrophobic lying in the narrow lazarette locker.
In the evening, Alan from “Victoria” invited all the cruisers in the bay over for Christmas Eve drinks. It was a good do and we didn't get home until after one o'clock.
25 December 2013 Bahia de Caraques, Ecuador
Only spending $10 each on each other’s Christmas presents worked quite well and was fun. I got a small bum bag and a huge Toblerone – Glenys confessed to overspending a little, but having received a nice slab of chocolate, I wasn't complaining. Glenys received a couple of small egg-shaped maracas, a little snow-storm toy, a plastic box to hold her collection of small shells and a packet of three Ferrero Roche balls. She immediately noticed that one of the chocolate balls was missing, so I explained that I HAD to eat one because the pack of three cost $1.50 and I was going to overspend by $0.50 …
After breakfast, we went with some other cruisers to the apartment of a local ex-pat (Alberto) for brunch, which was very pleasant – French toast, fruit salad and Buck’s Fizz. Glenys and I then went for a long walk along the beach under the impressive cliffs. We also visited the local school, which (strangely) looks after a huge Galapagos Tortoise called Miguelito. This animal has been living at the school for over 70 years and is estimated to be over one hundred years old.
Later in the afternoon, we joined ten other cruisers for Christmas dinner in the Puerto Amistad restaurant. It was disappointing – a buffet with a pork dish that was tasteless. I wish that we’d stayed in and had some roast chicken by ourselves. However, on the plus side, in the evening, we watched a James Bond Movie – it’s a tradition!
26 December 2013 Bahia de Caraques, Ecuador
Gasp, Shock, Horror! I actually got Glenys out for a run – it’s only two days to the Fun Run, so she was motivated to come out for a training run. Unfortunately, by the time that we’d got up to the cross, the sole of one of her running shoes fell off, so in the afternoon, she had to go and find a cobbler to get it repaired.
It was a pleasant day and not too hot, so I did some work on our teak deck. I've not done anything on it for over a year and found that we had over 60 screws showing. I removed each screw, drilled a deeper hole and replaced the screw with some sealant to stop water penetrating the deck. I now need to glue in some teak plugs and then trim them flush with the deck planking. It’s a laborious, but pleasant little job that took me most of the day.
Somehow, over the past couple of days, I've managed to sprain my wrist. It’s not enough to stop me doing jobs on the boat, but it aches like mad if I play my guitar for more than fifteen minutes. Oh Miser!
27 December 2013 Bahia de Caraques, Ecuador
I finally managed to sort through and edit all of the 300 photographs, which I've been putting off for more than a week now – it took all morning.
In the afternoon, we went to pay our registration fee for the Fun Run, picked up Glenys’s repaired running shoe and bought some more food. It was very busy in town, with people rushing around, getting ready for New Year’s Eve - we’re told that a lot of the apartments here are owned by wealth Ecuadorians who live in Quito and only come out for major holidays.
The street vendors are starting to sell papier mache effigies, which Ecuadorians burn on New Year’s Eve. This tradition is symbolic of cleansing the bad from the previous 12 months before the New Year commences. The effigies are often people who have been part of an important event during the year, so politicians are common, and I've been told that a very popular effigy this year is the footballer who let in the goal in the World Cup match against arch-rivals Peru. However, most of the effigies that we saw today were superheroes and cartoon characters, which are obviously targeted at children.
On the way back to the boat, we bought half a dozen Pan de Yuca rolls from an old lady who sells them every afternoon across the road from Puerto Amistad. Glenys boiled up some Quail’s Eggs and served them up with the Pan de Yuca as an aperitif with our evening beer – very decadent.
28 December 2013 Bahia de Caraques, Ecuador
We were up early to go for the Fun Run. It was a well-attended event with a few hundred participants, but the only other cruiser to participate was Charlotte from “Salamander”.
It was only 4 kilometres, but it was a demanding course. The first kilometre was along the Malecon to get warmed up and then down onto the beach running along next to rocks underneath the sea wall. The tide was coming in, so at times we were wading through knee deep waves or scrambling on slippery rocks. The beach eventually turned dry, which was even harder - ploughing through deep heavy sand.
To make it even more difficult, the organisers had put out some small obstacles – crawling under ropes, running through tyres, etc. By the time that we were taken back onto the road, I was knackered and had sand in my eyes, so the last kilometre was tough even though it was just on normal road.
Once through the finish line, the nicest sight was a fire engine, which was hosing down the hot, grimy runners – fabulous. All three of us survived the race without injury, but the sole pulled off one of my running shoes and another one of Glenys’s. Both sets of shoes are scrap. It’s very strange that we’ve now had three pairs of shoes self-destruct – perhaps it’s the heat and humidity?
We went out for an Almuerzo Tipico lunch at another one of the sea front restaurants and then went shopping for running shoes. Glenys managed to find a pair, but I was unsuccessful because my feet are too big – no one sells shoes larger than 44. I’ll have to make do with a pair of approach shoes that I’ve got tucked away somewhere on board.
We chilled out for the rest of the afternoon and watched another James Bond film in the evening – perhaps we’ll get through all 23 of them before we leave here.
29 December 2013 Bahia de Caraques, Ecuador
It was a pleasant day, so I went around the deck and epoxied 60 teak plugs into the holes left after my efforts a couple of days ago. When the glue's set, I’ll chisel off the surplus, but for now we've got lots of nasty toe stubbing plugs sticking ¼” out of the deck, so I've marked them all with blue masking take to make them obvious.
Glenys wandered into town and noticed that there was an inordinate amount of bright yellow women’s underwear on sale. She googled it when she got back and discovered another Ecuadorian New Year tradition. Women wear coloured underwear on New Year’s Eve to bring them luck for the year - red is supposed to bring love, yellow brings wealth.
We were invited over to “Viatrix” by Mauricio and Vanya for evening drinks. They’re heading up to Panama in January, so we gave them some of the information that we've accumulated over the past six months.
30 December 2013 Bahia de Caraques, Ecuador
It was a miserable day with a drenching, steady drizzle. I went for run first thing in the morning - up to the Cross again, but I only managed to run up the steep hill as far as last time I went out. I'm not sure whether I'm going to achieve my “Rocky” moment.
There was no chance of working outside on the deck, so we had a day lurking down below. “Salamander” and I swapped some films and music – they had over 200 films that we haven’t seen, so I spent a few hours copying stuff onto our hard disks and starting to reorganising it all because I'm running out of space now. I can't believe that I've filled three terabytes of disk space with my junk.
The rain stopped in the afternoon, so we went food shopping and then walked back into town to watch a parade in the evening. It wasn't exactly up to Disney World standards, but they had some nice floats depicting various Disney themes and fairy tales. We enjoyed it for an hour and retired back to the boat.
31 December 2013 Bahia de Caraques, Ecuador
We didn't have a good night sleep because the Puerto Amistad restaurant had a big party last night with incredibly loud music until dawn – these Ecuadorians know how to party.
We had a quiet day pottering about. I trimmed off the sixty teak plugs in the deck and found another dozen loose plugs in the side deck, so I've re-seated the screws – this is turning into a Sisyphus job.
We had dinner on-board and stepped out at nine o'clock with Mauricio and Vanya from “Viatrix”. There was a huge crowd gathered along the Malecon by the beach to watch the fireworks, which were very good, being set off from a sand bank in the middle of the estuary which dries at low tide.
After the fireworks, everyone started to leave, so we wandered around to the other side of the peninsula to the skateboard park where there was a huge crowd gathering. There were lots of food stalls, so we had a portion of chicken and chips and wandered around. Glenys spotted some stalls that were selling “Canelazo” which is a hot spiced drink laced with Aguardiente. They sell the stuff in old beer bottles and make a big show of showing you the amount of Aguardiente that they are putting into the bottle. The typical mixture is 25% Aguardiente to 75% fruit punch – pretty potent stuff.
The local kids (mostly boys) were running around all night armed with cheap (and very dodgy looking) fireworks, which they were setting off everywhere. There were several stalls selling firecrackers and other exploding firework – I assume that they are very cheap because the kids were running rampant.
At midnight, there was the usual cheering, fireworks and hugs. Then the locals started to burn the effigies that they’d been carrying around all night. It wasn’t as manic as I expected, but there were fires in all sorts of places – on the beach, at the side of the road and a major bonfire in the middle of the busiest road junction in town. The policemen riding around on motor bikes just ignored the lot…
We gave up at two o’clock, but the music and partying carried on until dawn.
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