Day 54: Bosque Cerro Blanco

Today we had a lovely bus at 5am back to Guayaquil in order to get another bus to Mancora. However, we had a whole day to kill so Clemmie found out that the last "dry" wood in Ecuador was fairly nearby so we thought we would go see what it was like. The bus station was a nightmare and there seemed to be endless queues of people (we couldn't figure out what for though) who really didn't appreciate two completely hopeless tourists with massive backpacks trying to squeeze through. Eventually we found a bus which would take us to where we needed to go and off we went. About 20 minutes later the bus stopped on the side of the road and the bus driver told us we were at Bosque Cerro Blanco, the only thing confirming this was a big wall with a steel gate with the words Cerro Blanco written on, but it didn't look very hopeful. We wondered up to the gates and it looked completely deserted, until a guard came out from a hut and unlocked the gate for us. We dropped off our bags and began up a little path to go and find a guide. The guard had warned us about the mosquitos but we had forgotten repellent and thought it would be fine. We couldn't have been much more wrong-within about 5 minutes we were already being bitten alive and it ended up us both having to watch each others backs and slapping the massive mosquitos whenever they landed on either of us. Several other people walked past and clearly found the whole scene hilarious and then kindly offered us some repellent. We finally found our guide who agreed to take us around for an hour or so and we managed to see quite a lot of lizards, lots of trees and sadly no monkeys. He said we would have had to hike a lot further up which in our attire (flip-flops and a dress) wasn't exactly going to be feasible, and also I think the amount of noise we made swatting mosquitos and complaining we were being eaten alive frightened any other animals away. Next stop was some mangroves- however, once we arrived we were told you had to be there at 4am so we returned back to the bus station again before catching the final bus that day back to Mancora.

Classic breakfast for Clem

The animals we would have seen had we been a bit less preoccupied with the mosquitos