Saturday (10-25-2008). Machala

After a quick desayunos (breakfast) of grilled cheese sandwiches with soft-boiled eggs, coffee and carrot juice we checked out and caught a bus to Machala, a coastal town. It hardly blew our mind as a tourist attraction, but it offered a lot as far as understanding the local culture and served as a great coastal antithesis to Montanita. Machala is mostly a port town near Jambeli, an island with a beach located forty minutes away via boat.

Javier, Saula´s 20-year-old nephew picked us up at the Azuay bus station. He´s an auto-mechanic with his own company, a university student and a racecar driver. We went from Machala to Ciudad Verde, a town just outside of Machala where he lives, making a pit-stop at his lot so that he could pick up ¨Chelita Linda,¨ his car that he would be racing in tomorrow:




Then we drove through a small town filled with concrete and wooden hovels where the residents work their individual garden plots.


This is where Javier and his co-workers began work on the trailer that would transport Javier´s racecar to Pasaje where the race was set to take place.



Machala is the commercial center for a province known as El Oro: the banana capital of the world. Most of the big money banana companies work out of Ecuador because unlike Columbia where 90 percent of the workers are unionized, very few in Ecuador have followed suit, leading to cheap labor and much exploitation. Exportadora Bananero, Chiquita, Dole and Del Monte are the kings of this land Apparently there is a lot of child labor on the plantations but we only brushed by them on the bus and didn´t enter far enough into the labors’ territory to confirm that detail.

But the children of Ciudad Verde seemed to be enjoying their childhoods:




Next, we headed to Puerto Bolivar, a prime spot for seafood and the local international port where most of the bananas and shrimp in Ecuador are exported. The boardwalk (really the cement-walk) is lit up at night with carnival games, bounce-houses for children and local artisan shops. The street is filled with discos and rows and rows of Picanterias (seafood restaurants). Javier took us to his favorite and treated us each to a heaping bowl of calamari, shrimp, clams, crab and bass. I stuck to the safer seafood sauce special rather than ceviche because I didn´t want to risk raw seafood with a stomach that felt littered with mines. We enjoyed our meal with a sunset, limonade and beer.




Puerto Bolivar can be a bit sketchy after dark, so we picked up Javier´s girlfriend and drove around town for a while checking out the sites. This wasn´t just normal driving. We were with a racing champion; there was much acceleration and sudden braking involved. Finally after a hairsplitting spin around town, we hit up a disco called the Hydra located in the center of Machala. There we drank more beer, played pool and danced for the rest of the night.