Ricardo y Susanita traveling the world: October 16, 2011 School, hiking and on to the beach!

Different kinds of corn...delicious...a
delicacy in the town of Pauta at the
Sunday market

Typical indigenous ladies at the in Pauta

Ricardo and Papacita reading the Kindle! (Yolanda's dad)

Once again we have so much to share. Since a picture is worth 1000 words, I shall go with more of the pictures and less of the words. We finished up our last week in Cuenca with more weekend trips before heading to the coast.

We finished up our month of school at Amauta Fundacion. This was really a chance for both of us to advance our Spanish. I have a hard time admitting that I am becoming an advanced student and am now realizing that I have studied just about all the grammar I need (including subjunctive) and now my big challenge will be to use all that I know. Building vocabulary and verbs is what I need to work on. When we arrived at the beach we both had to take a test to determine our levels and we tested the same....because I am good on paper and Ricardo is good in speech. After a few days, though, we realized that we needed to be with separate teachers and changed for the last 2 days to private instruction. We are now planning to read together every day and work together on our Spanish...also to speak to each other in Spanish more often.

In Pauta with the family... including our new friend
Fernanda from Brazil.

Mi maestra in Cuenca...Katia

Tree Huggers!!!

We loved this forest in Cajas National Park...the trees are called paper trees as the bark peels off and looks like paper.

Love this collage of plant life

The woods at Cajas

Brian goes for a COLD dip!

Who is helping???

Our maestra Jessica in Montanita...outdoor classroom

Oscar at the aquarium....preview of
things to come at Isla de la Plata

Volcanic mud bath (before the mud massage)

OK...now we are at the beach and dreamed about beautiful warm water for daytime and swimming as we had been cold in Cuenca. Little did we know that this is not the warm time at this part of the coast so we are back in our long sleeves with several blankets on our bed every night. Montanita was a surfers town with mostly young people, loads of dreadlocked hippies selling jewelry and trinkets, street vendors selling drinks on the street at night....party city. We lived at the Cabanas which was part of the school and had all young folks as our neighbors. In fact we made good friends with a young man from London, Rupert and we plan to see him again in Peru. He joined us on this "very different" day of volcanic water, mud, massage, steam and aloe vera. If you are looking for a surfer vacation then we would recommend this beach but if not...perhaps there are better places to visit. We did enjoy our school and our teachers and so the experience was worth it. Now we are one hour north, in the beach/fisherman village of Puerto Lopez and will report on that in the next blog.

Once again....love to everyone and thanks for traveling with us through South America.

This was taken after the mud massage...letting the mud dry to remove the impurities (what impurities??). Before the massage we went crawling in the mud.After the mud massage we cleaned off and then had aloe vera massages followed by steam room...skin like babies at the end.