Day Twenty Four - Montanita

We were up early this morning to get ready and have a quick breakfast before going whale watching.

We got in a mini bus with four other people from our hostel around 9ish, and waited about 10 minutes for two American girls from another hostel. When they turned up they were slow and dawdling and obviously super hungover!

We left from Montanita and got about 10km down the road until we came to a stop. The driver got out of the minibus to see what the hold up was. Lots of the Ecuadorian's from the local area had barricaded the road and created a protest, which stopped any traffic from passing in either direction. I walked down to have a look and they'd created a bamboo fence crossing the entire road. We were told this would last about half an hour so we sat patiently in the van and the sun started to break through the cloud and peak it's head out.

An hour later we were getting pretty fed up and just wanted to turn back and go enjoy the sunshine!! Our driver was nowhere to be seen, probably somewhere up by the protest getting involved! The local people were protesting about the lack of jobs in the area, and refusing to move until someone of authority came and heard them. We couldn't turn around as the whole road was blocked with angry bus and van drivers, and we couldn't walk back as it was so far. At this point the American girls (who, if they hadn't been late in the first place, wouldn't have even gotten us caught in the protest as we were only about 5 vehicles back!) decided to walk back to Montanita.

Another half an hour passed, and the police all began to leave the scene, which could only be a bad thing. With no police present, we could see it getting violent. The drivers began to start dismantling the barricade and the protesters were trying to stop them. Then some of the drivers tried to ram straight through it. Of course, the police rapidly returned to stop this!

Another ten minute later a bus full of pigs turned up, and started baking in the midday sun. The poor piggies were practically cooking, so the protesters agreed to let the pig van through the barricade. Our driver jumped back in the minibus and was going to use this is an opportunity to ram through behind the pig van. This of course didn't work and he got shouted at by a policeman in Spanish.

We were all super fed up by the point, so asked the driver to just give up and take us back to Montanita. We arrived back ten minutes later, and the trip organiser was very apologetic, saying there was nothing that could be done and that we could all go on the trip tomorrow. We still had to pay the minibus driver for his time, but I negotiated it down, seeing as we were essentially paying him to drive up for 10 minutes, stop and for him to disappear for two hours and then drove us back!!

The sun was still out so we grabbed some pizza (naturally), changed and ran down to the beach! Of course, 30 minutes later the sun went in and it clouded over again!!

After lunch, we left the beach and had a wander around town, I bought an anklet finally and we went further into Montanita to see what was going on. Turns out, not a lot!!

Back at the hostel, we did some more Galapagos organising and decided on a boat and a deal that sounded really good! We had a couple of drinks with our new couple friends and then went out to Papillon for dinner, the same burger place as Sunday. It was, again, really good! Back at ChiChi, we had another early night, seeing as we had to be up early again for the whale watching!