Manta Photos


I wasn't happy with where my Spanish was at, so I wanted to stop and study some more, but I wanted to combine it with learning how to kitesurf. Manta is one of the few places that has both Spanish schools and a kitesurfing school. To get better at anything, you have to put yourself in uncomfortable situations and for me, this was a very uncomfortable two weeks. I struggled with Spanish for four hours every morning and then headed to the beach to get tossed around in the sea all afternoon.

The first few days of controlling the kite were quite stressful. It felt like trying to tame a lion by holding its tail, but I got the hang of it eventually and was thrilled that I didn't destroy the kite in the process. After learning to control the kite, you have to learn to surf downwind. Unlike snowboarding, where there is a luxurious chairlift to take you back up the hill, in kitesurfing, you half to walk back upwind after each run, which makes learning that much slower. The good news is that unlike snowboarding, crashing face first into the ocean doesn't hurt. At the end of my eight day course, I could surf downwind pretty well, but not upwind yet. It's an amazing feeling to be in 25 knot winds and be skimming along the top of the water. There's something visceral about the pull of the kite on my hips that I don't quite get when sailing a boat.

Ecuador uses U.S. Dollars as its currency and it seems those Sacagawea dollars that are so unpopular in the U.S. get shipped here. They are everywhere. For the other denominations of coins, Ecuador supplements the supply by minting its own versions that are the same sizes as the U.S. ones and they are used interchangeably. However, there are no Ecuadorian dollar coins and no U.S. one dollar bills here because there are so many Sacagaweas that nothing else is necessary.

It's very common in Asia and Latin America for people to hop on buses to sell things to the riders and then hop off, but lately I've been witnessing some rather unusual ones. One time a guy got on with a bag of mints and gave a full five minute sales pitch for them. He was talking so fast that I couldn't understand him, but I was extremely curious what in the world he could be talking about for that long. I thought for sure that nobody would buy the mints when they could get them cheaper at a store, but when his speech was over, many of the passengers shelled out for them. Another time, a father son thespian duo got on and did a ten minute play. I didn't find it very entertaining, but everyone else seemed to love it and the duo collected quite a bit of loot.