I know it’s been a long time
since my last post and I’m sorry. So
much has happened and so little has happened.
I’ve had long periods of normal life separated by short periods of
intense life since making my decision to leave my home in Belize for a new
adventure somewhere else. By now you all
know that somewhere else is San Clemente Ecuador. What you don’t know is how much work it took
to come to that final decision on where to relocate. First, the reasons for my deciding to move. There are far too many memories of my past
life in Belize. Twelve years of annual
holidays with my wife Maggie, spending our anniversary every year here, doing
absolutely nothing but spending time together.
No laptops, no cell phones, condos with no TV, no touring, just working
on our relationship. Living here now is
keeping me from moving forward with my life.
The other reason and you may think it’s silly, is that when the
temperature drops to 70 degrees I’m feeling cold and having to put a top sheet
on my bed at night. Now I’m a Chicago
boy and have live in NJ for a total of 18 years so I know what cold is. Living in the Orlando are for 20+ years and
here for 5 my body has grown acclimated to high 80’s and 90’s 360 days a
year. So, because of those reasons I decided
it was time to start a new adventure.
Where to live was the big question.
My thought was to find somewhere that the temperature was, as I put it,
100 degrees all day every day. I love
the heat. I’ve learned to live without
air conditioning here in Hopkins even when it was 100 degrees with 85 percent
humidity. So looking at a map what
better place to find that than Ecuador?
Heck the equator runs through it!
I remember my travels in Southeast Asia when I visited the Philippines,
Malaysia, and Singapore in 1969-70 and how hot those countries were. Actually most places that I spent time in were
extremely hot but these 3 were oppressive at times. Anyway I thought that’s what Ecuador would be
like so I took a long hard look at it.
The internet is a wonderful tool
for doing research and I spend many, many hours researching Ecuador. Stable government, extremely friendly people,
low prices, and the Pacific Ocean for fishing.
One of the things that really drew me to EC too was that they use the
American dollar as their currency. In
Belize my bank account was in Belize dollars and while the exchange rate was
always 2 to 1 I had trouble getting American cash to travel and when I used
foreign ATMs I paid an international exchange rate plus the ATM fees. So that was a big plus.
Facebook turned out to be a great
resource too. I found several pages hosted
by expats living there and many wrote blogs about their daily trials and
tribulations of living there also. I
joined 5 or 6 of the pages and read their blogs and got a feel for what daily
life was like for them. Hey who better
than someone like yourself to ask questions of and not get the, “Oh this is
paradise and nothing bad ever happens here.” but what life is really like? I learned more about EC from them than all
the Wikipedia and tourism pages like International Living. I even formed some virtual friendships on
Facebook. So I decided to travel there
and spend a month touring the Pacific coast to pick out a couple of towns that
I thought would be nice to live in.
During my months of internet exploration I lived my normal fishing and laying in my hammock life. Boring to some, a wishful way to live for others. That’s what I mean when I say “long periods of normal life”. Nothing much happening to blog about because you’ve read about it for several years now and I only posted when something new and exciting was happening. I promised everyone when I first started blogging that I wouldn’t blog just to blog. That it would be something that I thought would interest you. I think I kept that promise. But now I sort of failed you because since June of last year I’ve done so much and blogged so very little. To catch you up by telling my normal rambling stories would take many pages and would keep you too long from your busy lives. True that many of you live vicariously through me but I don’t want to bore you with a long diatribe. So this post will hit the highlights of the past 10 months. Back to my story now.
I did blog about my 30 day trip to Antigua Guatemala in June/July when I went there to try to learn Spanish. I managed to get in 4 or 5 lesson days before reinjuring my knee and my stomach issues which caused me to drop out of school but remain in Antigua. I went back to Hopkins when I was physically able and then spent long days and nights of reading about Ecuador. I decided to head down south for the entire month of November to tour the coast and see where it is that I might want to end up. No blogging during those months because it was normal life. Anyway, I put together a travel itinerary with 2 night stops in 12 cities and towns and possible places to stay in each. My new found friends on Facebook recommended places to stay along my route and that was really helpful. I planned to chicken bus my way south to north starting in Salinas and ending in Mompiche. What better way to see a country than the local buses. I booked a flight into Guayaquil in southern Ecuador near the coast for November 1st with a return on November 30th.
I did blog a bit about my 1st Ecuador trip
and the towns I visited and the wonderful people that I met. I’ll recap though just to catch you up. I’ve traveled all of Central America with no
problem, not speaking any Spanish and never feeling uneasy because of it so I
thought Ecuador would be more of the same.
I was right. I wrote the names of
the towns I wanted to visit and the names and addresses of places to stay in my
notepad and would show that to the conductors on the buses and to cab drivers
and never had a problem. I was always
told when to get off the bus and was dropped right at the door of my hostel
with no problems. The sad part about not
speaking Spanish though was that I couldn’t talk to anyone. I couldn’t ask them questions about the towns
I was visiting or about their life. I
WILL rectify that though when I move.
I’ll start basic Spanish classes again so I can converse with the locals. I’m waiting though because I don’t want to
spend months not using the language and forgetting what I learned. I’ll be immersed in it, using it every day.
Back to my travels. Like I said I planned to spend 2 nights in 13
or so cities and towns along the “Ruta del Sol”. I fell in love with the country. The local people were truly friendly,
especially in the smaller towns and everyone greeted me wherever I went. I did walking tours of each town to see where
the grocery stores, fruit/veggie markets, and fish markets were. I paid
attention to prices to get an idea of what my living expenses might be in each
town. I looked for medical clinics and hospitals. I studied the transportation
routes and bus schedules. I especially
looked for places to fish. In Salinas I met up with James (DJ) Currington and
his wife Amanda who spent
the day driving me around the area showing me all the places I would need to
know about and took me to their beautiful home on a cliff.
In many of the smaller towns the
fish market was right on the beach where the fish were being brought in from
the nets. I was amazed at the variety
and size of their catches and the low prices.
In Crucita I took pictures of the 5-7 foot blue marlin, hammerhead and
thresher sharks, and BIG tuna that they were bringing in. They would cut as big a piece as you wanted
with their machete for $2.50 a pound. In Salinas I found a lot of seafood that
wasn’t available in Belize like mussels, clams, and squid. I heard that there
were oysters to be had up north too. I
was in love!
In a couple of bigger towns I
knew as soon as I got off the bus that they were not what I was looking
for. Too big and too congested. I even found 1 or 2 that were too small for
me as well. I think I knew all along that I wanted some place the size of
Hopkins. So I didn’t spend the night in
the too big towns, usually eating lunch and getting on another to the next
town. I made no prior hotel or hostel
reservations anywhere along my route so there was no worry about losing
reservation money.
So I made my journey north,
meeting more of the Facebook expat friends from the pages that I subscribed
to. They gave me so much good
information about the good, and bad, of the country. I was starting to feel
that it wasn’t going to be easy to choose a place to live because I felt to at
home everywhere I went. Along the way I
suffered an adventure or 2. Mostly it
was falling asleep on a bus and missing the stop where I planned to get
off. In one case I was only going 10
minutes up the road to the place I was staying and woke up 7 miles north of
where I should have been. Because the
buses only stop at designated stops after dark I was forced to stroll those 7
miles back along a winding mountain road.
Not a bad experience but not my favorite either.
So my month wound down. I had printed out my travel itinerary
(actually a number of Excel spreadsheets) and I kept notes on each town I
visited, highlighting the good and bad and the places that I stayed. I never made it as far north as I had planned
though. My last stop was Jama (where I
took my stroll). By then I’d been told
that there wasn’t much of interest further north and that some of the towns
might not be too safe for foreigners.
Whether they are or aren’t I‘ll never know but I thought it best to take
the advice of my expat friends. I want
to mention 2 places that I stayed along my route because they were so
nice. One was near Manglaralto-Montanita
and is called Nuestra Paraiso and is owned by Bill and Colleen, a Canadian
couple. They hadn’t actually opened for
business yet but they welcomed me with open arms as their 1st
guest. The other was a private cottage
in Don Juan (near Jama and again, where I took my stroll) and is owned by Don
& Cheryl PaPania. I really want to
thank both couples for their hospitality!
By this time I’d settled on San
Clemente and Crucita as possible places to live So I headed back south. I’d picked up 5 nights because of bypassing a
couple of places so I decided to give San Clemente another look. Funny thing happened on my 1st
pass through SC. I was in touch with
Mary Macdonald and her husband John before I went there the 1st
time. I checked into my hostel and did a
walk-about. I was headed back to my
hostel and decided to walk down the main street again. I had actually planned to bypass it. Anyway I’m walking and I hear a man calling
my name. I sort of ignored the call
because that couldn’t be. Who the heck
did I know there? I’d forgotten that I
“Facebook” knew John and Mary! They’d
come by my hostel looking for me but I was gone so they decided to hit the main
street to get dinner with friends. Well
they bought my dinner and we got acquainted.
They’ve become my best friends there.
So anyway, back to San Clemente.
This time I stayed at Casa Punta Bikini, owned by Libby Rush. I’d walked past it on my 1st visit
but it didn’t look like it was open.
This time it was and what a great place to stay! She was actually newly opened too and she and
her son David asked for my input on what would make their hostel a nice place
to stay. I gave them a few ideas based
on what I liked in other places I stayed not only in Ecuador but all through
Central America too. That became my home
base for this trip and my next in January.
Back to Hopkins for 4 days and
then on to Orlando for almost a month at Christmas, back to Hopkins for 2
weeks, and then back to Ecuador for an extended stay in San Clemente to see
what it was like to actually live and shop there. I booked a 45 day stay and rented a 1 bedroom
apartment about a ½ mile north of the center of town. I didn’t know that San Clemente was a
favorite for Carnival so I didn’t know that hostel prices sky rocketed during
that week period. Thankfully David found
me a place where the owner didn’t care about increasing his price. I paid $400 for about 40 days. John and Mary lived right up the hill from me
so we spent quite a bit of time together and they took me to around the area to
the markets and stores that I would be frequenting when I moved there. So nice of them! Also while I was there I had 3 guests. My friend Sheila Hardrick from Houston and
Ralph and Christine Quilling from Montana came to visit for about a week
each. I’d met all 3 at different times
when they came to stay at Kismet Inn where I lived. Sadly Sheila suffered breathing problems the
entire time she was there so we didn’t get to do much. We did get down to the beach twice and out
for 1 great meal. I was able to drag
Ralph and Christine to the Sunday fruit/veggie/fish/meat market in Charapato
and we had a great time. They were also
with me for Carnival. I met so many other wonderful American and Canadian
expats while living there. I joined
several of their weekly lunches at various restaurants and gained more great
insight on the town. John and Mary and I made a morning of fishing the beach
with John being the only one of us to catch a fish. I changed my Facebook profile picture to one
of me in the water fishing with a wave breaking almost over my head. A group if us chartered a boat too to take us
out fishing just off the coast and most of us caught something. Because if all of them I made my final
decision to move to SC. John and Mary
graciously offered to store the clothes and fishing equipment I brought so that
I can bring more on my next trip, traveling lighter and cheaper than if I had
to bring all of it back with me to BZ and back to EC. What a blessing that is!
I’m back in Hopkins, living a
normal life (well as normal as it gets here!), and selling off everything but a
few more clothes and some fishing terminal tackle that I want to take with me.
There are a few other personal things like the cookie jar head that I grew up
with and is as old as me, my 1-1/2 gallon water filter (Pat and Trece you know
what I’m talking about), and my veggie steamer.
Try as I might I couldn’t find on to buy in Ecuador and I use it A
LOT!!! So it’s coming with me.
So anyway, I waited 2 weeks to start selling everything because my friends Matt and Angie Jenkins planned a visit to fish with me just 2 days after I returned. Plenty of fishing and a 3 day sailboat cruise to Tobacco Caye so Matt could dive and the rest of us snorkel and fish. I got an unexpected invite to go fishing for the restaurant we were eating in with Eric the dive master and we hooked into a couple of 10-12 pound crevalle jack tunas, a barracuda, and a really nice snapper.
After Matt and Angie left my “normal” Hopkins like turned into a big flea market and has been running for the past 2 weeks. I posted everything that I had for sale on 2 Hopkins-Sittee River Facebook pages and also had the list bulk emailed to everyone on a private list. I hadn’t planned on the response that I go so I had to rent space in one of Trisha’s rooms to display everything. My 3 rods and reels and my snorkel gear brought an immediate and overwhelming response and sold very quickly. So that ended my fishing days. I sold all my big ticket items like my mattress and fridge to a newly-wed couple, my microwave, coffee pot, espresso maker, countertop oven, crockpot, etc. with an agreement that I could use them until I moved. I had lots of other things like tools that I’m selling and still have a bit of household stuff to sell. I do have 2 people who want to buy whatever is left but for now I’m holding out. I also sold my trailer and that was a huge weight off my shoulders. I wasn’t asking much and truth be told I was selling more the household goods in the trailer with the trailer as the packaging than the trailer itself. It does have to be moved off Kismet property. I finally set my move date as Monday April 28th when I’ll head to Playa Del Carmen for a short rest and then on to Orlando around May 7th. So my days now are mainly moving stuff around in the room and laying in a hammock with a book and a cigar. I do miss fishing though.
A few words on the requirements for a Retiree citizenship visa that is driving my trip to Orlando in May. Ecuador requires that you have a monthly income of at least $800 for a single person and $1000 for a couple. You also need a 5 year police background check. Both documents have to be brought or sent to the Secretary of State office of the state in which they are issued to be apostilled and the income letter has to be presented to the EC Embassy or Consulate in the state you live in for approval. So that will require me to travel to Tallahassee and Miami with a side trip to visit my sister Eileen and family in Charlotte NC before I leave the states. All documents have to be translated into Spanish as well. The document requirements have changed recently and you may or may not need a long form birth certificate (one that names your parents and where they were born) so I’ll get that and have it apostilled as well. I’ve also read conflicting stories about whether or not you can get your Visa Stamp entered in your passport before going to Ecuador. Again that would be at their Embassy or Consulate. I’ll look into that before I go to Miami and if it’s possible I’ll do it there. If not David has agreed to help me obtain it when I get back to San Clemente. Obtaining it in the states would insure that I can book a one way ticket to Ecuador. Otherwise I might have to pay full fare and then cancel the return. That’s a hassle though.
So that’s it for now. I’m looking at the calendar with sadness for all the great friends I’m going to leave behind in Belize but with anticipation for my new Ecuadorian adventure as well as seeing family and friends while I’m in Orlando. That’s it for now. I’ll do a better job of keeping you all updated with my departure from Belize and my arrival and settling in in Ecuador.
As always, practice peace!
