Bananas don't grow on trees, you know...

They really don't. But I'll get to that in a bit.

It occurs to me that my last four or so blog titles have ended in ellipses. I swear I'm not turning into the Rev. Dr. Jack B. Winget, Esq. (I know the Esq. isn't real and I know I'm missing some other title, but I don't remember.)

Despite having my typical really, really awful mid-October cold, the trip to Guayaquil and Machala went pretty well. I spent most of the drive to Guayaquil talking to another student from our school, a British guy named Rob. For all you LOST fans, he was pretty much Charlie's twin except with a London accent. He needed a ride to Guayaquil to catch a plane to Colombia, and the teachers just told him to come on our bus. We talked about travel, music, baseball vs. cricket...all kinds of things. We wound up kind of adopting him for the day, actually. He spent the night at the hotel with us, and we taught him how to play Egyptian Rat Screw. The best thing about traveling is the interesting people you meet.

Monday night we walked along the Malecón, which is a big, beautiful walking area along the river, part park, part monument, and part shopping mall. It's kind of the pride and joy of the city, and at the end of it you can climb 444 steps to the top of a tower from which you can see all of Guayaquil. The next morning we had a tour of the city, with a guide who spoke really excellent English, which was a nice respite for my brain. Guayaquil is the most populous city in Ecuador, and it's the only city in the country where you can find the extravagantly rich living around the corner from absolutely destitute. Poor people tend to just take over huge areas of land, live quietly for a few years, and then demand that the government provide them electricity and water, which then comes out of the pockets of the upper and middle class. It's been undergoing some extensive beautification and reorganization programs for the past few years. We toured the cathedral, which is beautiful but simple as Catholic churches go, and we walked around the main park, which is literally crawling with iguanas.

Tuesday afternoon we drove to Machala, which is about four hours away. We had lunch at the hotel, which was something of an ordeal, because we have about five vegetarians in the group and nobody in Ecuador really seems to understand or care about what that entails. After that we had several hours to walk around the city, which is loud and colorful and crowded and dirty. The streets are way more chaotic than Cuenca. Lauren, Sara, and I wound up getting tremendously lost, and we asked for directions three times, but everybody told us something different and wrong. We wound up taking a cab back to the hotel, and even that was difficult. Our hotel was called the Hotel Royal, which we pronounced like it would be in Spanish: "Roy-AHL". It turns out it's just pronounced like we would say it in English normally, so nobody could figure out what we meant.

Wednesday morning we went to a banana plantation. I'm sure I'm not the only one who was surprised to learn that the big, tall, leafy, green things that produce bananas are not trees. They're herbs. No joke. Each stem can only ever produce one bunch of bananas, and it takes nine months to reach maturity, so there are always different generations at different stages of growth sprouting from the same plant. We didn't see anything being harvested, but we did see large bunches of bananas being separated, cleaned, sorted, plastered with stickers, boxed up, and loaded onto a truck. For the amount of space they take up, banana plantations aren't a huge source of employment. Each one only has about fifty workers, and while the plantation we visited pays $18 a day (a pretty good wage for that kind of job in Ecuador), the employees only work about three days a week.

We then went to a shrimp farm, owned by the same people, which was much less interesting. It basically consists of a bunch of large, murky ponds full of shrimp, which are harvested at night after a certain amount of time. One of the workers threw a net into a pond, collected about fifty shrimp, and dumped them in a bucket for us to see. We were allowed to pick them up, which some people did, and some people kissed them as well. I am still not sure I like to even eat them, so I just watched.

After the shrimp farm, we went to a port where they ship all kinds of things out of Machala. We got to wear hard hats...and that was pretty much the highlight of that. Then we drove back to Cuenca.

All in all, it was a good trip. This post has gotten sufficiently long, so I'll sign off for now.