Puerto Lopez 8/18/12 - 8/20/12

After the night bus dropped us off at a random location, no where near a bus terminal and not in the town we thought we were going to, we figured out that we had to get a cab to the bus that was headed to Puerto Lopez.  Fair enough and easy to do, just not what we expected at 5:30 in the morning in a random Ecuador coastal town.

There wasn't a lot to the town of Puerto Lopez.  It was a pretty basic beach town and it was overcast most of the time we were there.  We went to Puerto Lopez with one thing in mind- going whale watching!  We were told the high season for whale watching was somewhere between July and September.  This is the time of their mating season.  Whales jump out of the water as a part of "flirting" during mating season.  Thus, we navigated our way through the 30 something guys trying to sell us whale watching tours and sat along the beach in order to watch what kind of boats went out on these tours.  From what we could tell, it was a "pack 'em in and maybe they will see a whale out there" mentality.  We saw at least 30 people getting on boats that were probably meant for 15 people. That wasn't what we wanted.

Luckily, we stumbled upon a shop that offered much more.  We had to stay an extra day to do this tour because they were full the next day, but we figured it was worth it.  The tour consisted of a boat, which only carried 16 passengers, traveling one hour to Isla de la Plata (a small island), a 2 hour hike around the island, lunch, snorkeling, and another hour back to town.  The hour trip each way was the whale watching part of it.  All in all, the tour was about 7 hours and didn't cost that much more than the 2 hour whale watching trips with other companies.   

The island was cool to see, but there wasn't much to it except for the Blue Footed Boobies (that's a bird) and an easy hike.  We got to see some huge sea turtles from the side of our boat and they were incredible.

Then, the one hour boat ride back to town was when the magic happened.  On the way to the island we saw a couple of whale tails from afar, but nothing to write home about.  But, on the way back we had a good thirty minute session of true, up close whale watching!  The Captain told Matt that we were very, very lucky to see what we saw.  Some days the tour doesn't see any whales, but we were lucky enough to travel super close to 3 humpback whales that were jumping like crazy.  Everyone in the boat watched these magnificent animals in amazement!  The pictures and videos we took don't even do it justice.  We loved every second of it!!  You can view all of our pictures and videos of the whales on our flickr page by clicking the "Picture Album" category on the right hand side of this page. 

Puerto Lopez was a success!  Next on the agenda- wake up early and get to Peru.

Although Matt forgot pics, just a note that we stayed at a place called Hostel Maxima for $7 each.  It wasn´t too impressive, but clean enough for us and had hot water (although it had a bit of saltiness to it).