Sailing and cruising around Ecuador

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January - 1992
We're sitting in Salinas, Ecuador charging our batteries before we start sailing across the Pacific; We have a lot to do to get ready, and we don’t want to leave until the first of March, earliest, so that we don't run into any hurricanes along the way.

A bit about Ecuador. Salinas, Ecuador is their "Costa Azul" - it seems like everybody comes here to the beach for their vacation, and it's chock full of condos for the Ecuadorian wealthy. But this is desert - they say that at most it will rain five days out of the year. (Quite a change from Cocos Island, eh?). As a result, any water is an expensive and hard-to-get commodity. (And we've been warned that water is not safe to drink anywhere in Ecuador, except for specially bottled and labeled purified water).

The Ecuadorian people are very lovely - rich or poor, they seem to be a gentle and gracious bunch. They are very curious about us - they rent these paddle boats and come out to Yacht Watermelon to look at us and talk to us - their questions invariably start with "where are you from?" then "how long have you been here?" and then "when are you leaving and where are you going?". Our first reaction was that they were casing the boat - but no, they're just curious, but their experience with foreigners is so limited that they just don't know what questions to ask. Like so much of South America, the majority of the population is poor (as in dirt poor), with a very few very wealthy people. One interesting item - in most places in Venezuela and Costa Rica (both of which are wealthier countries than Ecuador), stealing yachts' dinghies seems to be the national sport. It's so bad that many yachts not only lock up dinghy and outboard, but pull it out of the water every night so that it's hanging in the air alongside the boat. Here in Salinas our stuff is so safe we've left dinghy and outboard unsecured on the beach for eight hours at a stretch and nobody's touched it (except for the little kids, who naturally just can't resist touching everything that they see). People warn us to be careful about thieves, which is only sensible, but I don't think they know what real thievery is like - this is the most laid-back place we've ever been.

They have a fun New Year's Eve tradition of burning the "old year". Every family makes up a dummy representing the old year - the bigger the dummy the worst the old year was. We saw two huge paper and wood fishing boat replicas of the old year, complete with nets, blocks and tackle, etc. (those people must have had a really bad year). The dummy is stuffed full of fireworks, and at midnight they set them afire. Midnight it looked as if they were burning the town down, and the fireworks going off sounded like an invasion. .Men dress up like women, makeup and all, and go around as the old year's widow, begging for coins - all in fun .... Then the partying starts, and goes on until sunrise. Actually, these people party late every night. There is more activity on the streets of Salinas at four or five in the morning than there is at nine in the morning or evening. We are talking laid back people. We're pretty laid back ourselves right now.

Reading the papers is an interesting experience. Right now there's a garbage crisis in Guayaquil. It seems that of the 240 new garbage trucks bought, only about 28 are functioning. Cronies of the mayor have stolen so many parts from the rest of the trucks that they are just useless scrap. And there's no more money to buy more trucks. The people in Guayaquil finally got so fed up with garbage in the streets that they picked it all up and dumped it on the mayor's home - inside and out. There were riots, and general lawlessness for a day or two. Really quite funny. Now the papers are full of the electricity crisis in the country - power outages which are destroying home appliances, interrupting banking transactions, messing up day-to-day commerce. (As in most of Latin America, the utilities are government-owned. There is some privatization going on in some countries, but not in Ecuador).

We're told that the mountain areas of this country are very beautiful, and we're looking forward to seeing some of it before we leave. We're lucky that we're traveling with two other boats (it's really quite an informal arrangement), so that we can watch each others' boat when someone goes inland to travel. The yacht club here in Salinas is not set up for visiting yachts at all, and so they're of no help to us.

One of the things that is very clear to us is how lucky we are In the U.S. Everything works there - telephones, mail service, etc. And it's when we try to buy food or whatever down here that we realize just how cheap food is in the U.S., compared to people's incomes. The food prices here in Ecuador, for example, are about the same as they are in the U.S. (fish and shrimp are cheaper, but meat and chicken are more expensive), in some cases a bit higher. Some stuff is as good as in the U.S., but generally the quality of the food isn't as high. Fresh fruits and vegetables are generally cheaper, but the quality and freshness isn't very high, and the selection is pretty poor. The average pay for someone here is far less than in the States. For example, we've hired two young boys to do the difficult cleaning on the boat (going up the mast to clean all the rigging, for example - we really don't have the energy or agility to do that anymore). They are happy to receive $5.00 or $6.00 a day for the work they're doing. It's almost embarrassing. These are bright, hardworking kids - not the lazy morons we see so often in the Caribbean. Water is such a problem that I bring our laundry to a lady in town to do. She hand washes, dries, and irons everything, and I pay about $5.00 a load (that's a week's worth of clothes and sheets and towels). She and her family live in a squatter's one-room shack - scavenged boards nailed randomly on a frame of bamboo poles. There's no indoor plumbing and no furniture to speak of. Of course, since it's a "squatter" shack, there's no taxes or anything on it. Since there's no running water, TV, heat, air-conditioning, whatever, it's cheap living. But oh, my, dirt floors and a hammock for a bed. These people have to work very hard every single day to make enough money to just feed themselves. There's no social security or unemployment insurance, or any of the "safety nets" we have in the States.

Some people when they travel in countries like this feel very superior, and don't truly understand the depths of the poverty under which these people are struggling. They see the dirt and shabbiness but don’t see that the underlying political structure is the cause of the misery. And we're beginning to realize that the majority of the people in the world live like this - the western European and North American standard of living is an aberration. What a pity, because it's a never-ending cycle of poverty and ignorance breeding a new generation of ignorant poor. That my washer woman can maintain her sense of dignity even under the appalling conditions of her life amazes me.

It looks as if we'll be sailing to French Polynesia in the company of two other boats. "In company with" only means that they'll be within 500 or so miles of us, but at least it's in radio contact, and we are able to exchange information with each other.

We arrived in Ecuador too late to make the trip down to Chile for their summer, so we've decided to put a hold on that for awhile (although I'm terribly disappointed). Peter, in a way, is relieved. Chile is one of those places that, for a sailboat, "you can't get there from here". There is no comfortable way to get to Chile by boat, particularly now that Peru's problems are so severe that it is literally dangerous to go there. We met an English couple that visited Peru in November and December last year - just a few weeks before we arrived in Ecuador. They were held up by the Peruvian police and held for ransom. They didn't have any cash with them, so the cops brought them to the bank to get cash on their credit card. Fortunately they had a $500/day limit on cash advances, so that was all that they lost. But it's a bit scary when it's the police who are doing the robbing. Anyway, they begged us to avoid Peru. Enough of that. Except that it makes our trip a bit more complicated, there are still plenty of places in the world to visit, so who needs Peru or Chile (except that everyone we have met who's been there tells us that Chile is absolutely beautiful, and that it's one of the most civilized of the Latin American countries. Oh, well, another time, perhaps).