After eating, we headed off to the beach. Robin was enamored with Montañita and wished she hadn’t only just discovered it on the day before she was to leave Ecuador. She plucked stones from the sand as they struck her fancy, inspected them and dropped them into her purse, while I walked in silence and reeled from my overfilled stomach. When we got to the rocky outcropping of cliff at the north end of the beach, I began collecting Opuntia (“prickly pear cactus”) pads from where they were spilling down the cliff from a giant patch growing wild at the Sanctuario high above us. I had remembered seeing the cacti here before and planned to use this trip to nab a few of them for the cactus landscaping I was planting at A1’s. Having done that, we looked at our watches and decided we should begin moving in the direction of home.

      We moseyed back through Montañita and climbed aboard the next bus that passed through. Our randomly selected bus contained one Lonne and Sally on their way to Quito. We shrieked our various surprises and salutations and I stopped in the aisle by their seats to see what was new. Susanna Ricaurte had just been by to see them earlier that day. We compared notes on our encounters, analyzed the secret significance of various statements Susanna had made and speculated as to the true nature of our statuses as far as the Boss Woman and thus the Peace Corps was concerned. Our verdict was that we are all in fine standing. We yelled to each other over the din of the bus engine and clamor of the worn out suspension until my still overstuffed stomach was literally ready to eject its contents all over Lonne and Sally. At that point, I took my place with Robin in the back of the bus.

      Back in Tambo, Robin and I found A1 sitting in the kitchen shoveling a large bowl of crab parts into his expressionless face. His wife was cooking dinner adjacent to him and his brother was propped in a nearby doorway making conversation with the both of them. I popped in to announce our return by way of several wisecracks about the dog meat I alleged Susanna was dicing on her cutting board. Julio asked when Robin would be heading to Guayaquil. I told them she was leaving after we ate the very dinner Susanna was preparing at that moment. This news came as a great surprise to them and for the moment they both appeared genuinely shattered. They expressed as much to each other in low, mournful voices and repeated a curiously haunting refrain about the ‘girl leaving’, as if catching up on all the back eulogizing they would have been doing if they had known Robin was leaving earlier.

      While Robin was in my room doing some last minute stuffing of her luggage, I drifted out to the future site of my cactus garden and stared intently at all the imaginary plants. When Robin and A1 tired of their respective activities, they gravitated out to where I was, and soon, A1 formally began a series of questions that I was told to translate to Robin. They were all more or less oriented along the lines of “What do you think about this country, its people, and ‘what feelings are you taking home’”. I translated this to Robin, trying to maintain a grave expression, but knowing we were both were both fighting back grins at this awkward turn of events. Her answers were muddled, as would have been mine if I were in her position, and my paraphrased translations to Julio were obviously not hitting the spot.

      We were called inside to eat. Susanna was visibly peeved when I announced I was still too full from earlier to attempt more eating. I probably should have said something about that earlier when I was accusing her of cooking dogmeat. I sat with A1 and Robin at the table anyway and A1 resumed his series of questions. This was sort of a cultural thing. A1 knew the time to export Robin was near and he was waxing formal according to the progression of such events, as he has always known them. In this sense, the nature of the conversation didn’t bother me. However, the fact that A1 had begun finishing my sentences as I relayed him the translations DID bother me. Why do people do this? Do I talk too slow or are people just generally annoying and driven to monopolize the other party’s allotment of the conversation, in English as well as Spanish? And they always predict the ends of the sentences incorrectly. Stop that. All of you. It’s really annoying.

      Robin wanted pictures of everyone. I relayed this message to Susanna, who never lets me take pictures of her, and she consented immediately. A1, Susanna, Robin, eventually Ivan, a random assortment of neighbor kids and I assembled outside in the near darkness for a photo shoot. Afterwards, A1 offered to help us get our bags to the C.L.P. bus station in Libertad, which we accepted.

      Our C.L.P. bus to Guayaquil broke down about 2 hours into our 2 ½ hour trip, but all aboard simply grabbed the next C.L.P. bus following 15 minutes behind us, as the cooperative runs busses to Guayaquil every 15 minutes. We taxied from the bus terminal to The Sander hotel in downtown Guayaquil, my hotel of choice, based on price ($10.00 for 2 people) and quality (a very relative concept here). The clerk at The Sander told me there were no rooms the very instant I passed through the doorway. I told Robin to sit with the bags in the Hotel Sander’s lobby and I would go out in search of another hotel. The next 5 hotels I checked also told me they were full. Actually, one of those hotels had rooms, but they quoted me a price well above the conspicuously posted prices on the wall behind the counter. I declined to pay 3 times the rate of The Sander just for a place to sleep. There had to be other rooms in town- and there were. The lady behind the glass at the “Hotel Quito” front desk said they DID have rooms, but did I need one ‘for a few hours or for the night?’

      “Um, for the night, please”, I said, suddenly noticing a formidable stack of VHS pornos on the counter.

      “7 dollars”, she announced

      “Oh, there are 2 of us, is that 7 dollars for each person, then?”

      “Where’s the 2nd person?” she asked very, very pointedly.

      I blinked at the woman, who stood behind the glass scrutinizing me. In light of the first 10 seconds of this exchange, I took this question to mean she assumed I had plans to pick up a prostitute (a thing frowned upon even by sleaze bag hotels in Ecuador).

      “In another hotel”, I answered, well aware of how shady that response sounded.

      “Are you 2 a pair?” she probed further.

      “Yes.”

      “You’re a pair?” she repeated, very deliberately.

      “Yes.” I knew a pair was 2 married people, or at least an arrangement resembling such. Robin and I were nothing of the sort, but I was just trying to communicate that I was not bringing back a prostitute.

      “Is this other person male or female?” she asked, in a manner so shady and deliberate that I broke out laughing. That could’ve been a scene from a movie. Now I had no idea where in the hell the conversation was going.

      “Female.”

      “Ok, yeah, you’re a pair” she said, smiling down at her registry with satisfaction. I don’t know what she had just convinced herself of, but I was happy she had finally run out of questions. I told the woman I would be right back.

      I walked the 2 ½ blocks back to where Robin was now sprawled out in furniture watching the Miss America pageant. I told her we had scored a room, it was only 7 bucks for both of us, but that it was some kind of shady rendezvous point for sleaze bags and there were pornos on the counter. I felt like a total poon flagging down a cab to take us and our bags 2 ½ blocks over to the Hotel Quito, but I had to admit that 2 gringos walking through downtown Guayaquil at night with almost too much luggage to lift, would rank fairly high in a book titled “101 Very Colorful Ways to Die”.

      The woman at the front desk of the Hotel Quito broke out laughing when she saw Robin and I struggling through the door carting a metric ton of luggage. We paid the woman and snatched our key from the counter. When we had finally gotten everything lugged upstairs to room 103, we pushed the key into the door and braced for the worst. We flung the door open and took a step backwards. The bed was not heart shaped, the ceiling did not have mirrors and the floor and bed were not as dirty as they theoretically could have been. We entered tentatively. I peeked into the bathroom. A cockroach was standing on the garbage can. I tried to discretely smash it with my foot but banged the can loudly and knocked the creature unharmed into the trash. Robin asked what had just happened in there. I told her ‘nothing’. I walked out of the bathroom and casually smashed another roach on the wall with my foot, then saw yet another one in the corner. I moved towards it but it escaped beneath a weird metal door in the wall before I could get to it. What was this metal door for? What was behind it? Robin asked me what I was staring at there in the corner.

      “Um, nothing. Wanna sleep with the lights on tonight?”

      “Yep.”

      She didn’t even need to ask ‘why’. We placed our heads down on our plastic covered pillows, closed one eye, and then at length the other, and after a few fitful moments, switched our brains to standby for the night."

      Then I exited the airport, walked out to the street and grabbed a $1 cab to the Bus terminal because I didn’t feel like waiting for the 25-cent bus that would have been by any second. At the Bus Terminal, I walked right on to a C.L.P bus and 2 hours and 11 minutes later, stepped off in Santa Elena. I had not picked up my mail from the post office in more than 3 weeks, so I used this opportunity to do so. I had 5 large manila envelopes from the Peace Corps and 1 letter with a news clipping from home. I carted everything home and toasted my last 2 pop tarts and made coffee.

      At about 11am, I began typing up my massive backlog of web entries and couldn’t seem to get stopped. I worked on my brand new (new to me) laptop until about 5pm, when A1 needed to cut power to the house for some reason. I used this opportunity to take a break, go outside and dig a hole in the hard-packed earth for my new cacti, which I refilled with desiccated goat crap, wood shavings and a sifted out version of the original soil. 4 neighbor kids ‘helped’ me at every turn, first helping me round up the desiccated goat crap, then getting in the way of my hole digging and rock disposal. They were having the time of their lives and only actually got on my nerves near the end when they focused all their energy into asking me nonstop, unintelligible and ultimately pointless questions. Upon completion of the cactus bed, I returned to my laptop and worked until about 9pm, pausing only to eat dinner and kill a bee that had gone mad, entered my room and attacked my hanging light bulb.

      I typed up back web entries from 11am to 2:30pm and then caught a bus to Libertad to send a massive amount of text for this website to Mike Lake. Then I walked over to a tienda that sells farm animal related products to do some price shopping. I bought a 25-cent syringe and a vile of injectable iron for a future pig charla I’m planning. Then I walked to “7 corners” to meet Lorena and her co-worker, as they had invited me earlier to go pasiando. On the way, I found a large patch of a succulent groundcover that had light pink flowers so I ripped a few handfuls out of the ground for my cactus bed.

      I beat Lorena and her co-worker to 7 corners by about 15 minutes. When they arrived, we slowly walked through Libertad while I entertained a wealth of questions concerning my trip, until we came to an old, well-landscaped, butternut-colored catholic church perched upon the ridge of the ocean side precipice. We leaned over the railing and watched what appeared to be a number of people learning to line dance on the beach below, while a rigorous sea breeze fluttered in our ears for what then felt like an interminable suspension of the conversation. When Lorena’s co-worker excused herself and left for home, Lorena and I descended a long staircase to the beach. We walked out to the end of a stone pier for a while to see if any whales would turn up and then continued down the rocky shoreline. When we reached a point where a small city park linked the beach to the main street running through downtown Libertad, we circled back and caught a bus home.

      I jumped off the bus in Tambo and waded through borrachos all the way home. After tossing my backpack into my room, I headed back out to Merci’s tienda where I planned to buy a 5-gallon drum of drinking water. En route, I passed Julio and Susanna on their way back from the tienda, as they had been trying to commence their usual Saturday night activity. They told me that Merci’s husband was drunk, as he had been all week, and the tienda had already been closed up for the night.

      I went home and typed until 10pm, when I received a phone call from Iveth Bonilla, a friend from the States who was born and raised in Ecuador and was currently visiting her family who still live near Quito. We had corresponded a bit by email just prior to her flying down and had decided I would come up to Quito to hang out following her brief excursion to the Galapagos. Iveth was now calling to confirm the plan and give me her itinerary for the days following her Galapagos trip. She gave me the phone number of her friend, Maria, and her brother, Oswaldo, and told me to give either one of them a call when I figure out which dates I was coming up for because they could broker the rendezvous. I said I would do just that, then hung up the phone.

      At breakfast, Susanna wanted to borrow my toaster because the family had gotten hold of actual sliced bread and they wanted to try toasting it. Due to inexperience, the family’s toasting fiasco got off to a rocky start, but soon, Julio announced to his wife in the next room that the bread had just ejected itself automatically, and we were under way. Julio snatched a toast from the slot and shoved it directly into his mouth. Susanna came running into the room and grabbed the other toast, flipped it on to a plate, which she threw to me and then stuffed 2 more slices into the toaster. This scene was repeated numerous times throughout the next several minutes and it may have been the most exciting breakfast I have ever partaken in. Everyone kept saying “hotbread (pan caliente)” as if it were a single word. I have to admit, I’ve eaten about 37 lbs of bread since the last time any of it was toasted and it really did light up the El Tambo dawn. Already, I can’t wait for tomorrow morning.

      At around 10am, while waiting for my charla people to show up, I began work in the cactus beds I have planned for the side of the house. At 10:30am, there was a grand total of 3 people waiting for my charla to begin. We stood around talking about nothing until 11am, at which time I gave the charla. Then I went home and returned to work on my cactus beds. 7 year old neighbor Ines helped me, first by asking lots of questions, and then by hauling the rocks I sifted from the soil in the bed of a little truck which she pulled to the back of the yard by a string and then dumped. I finished all the work it was possible to do on the beds at that time and retired to my room to write.

      During dinner, the 15 year old sister of Lorena, along with a friend, stopped over and asked me to write my name on a piece of paper. I did so and she then proceeded to very slowly copy what I had written on to a small paper party invitation. Why she didn’t just have me write my name on the invitation itself, or just hand me the invitation and say “you know who the hell you are”, I would have to be inbred to understand. But I do know they love a paper party invitation in these parts. She thanked me. I thanked her back. She seemed proud of herself for having accomplished her mission. It was cute. I’m not at all looking forward to this party.

      And then- and you’re not going to believe this- I went back to writing for the rest of the night.