Paradise found

Related Stories

• No jacket required at erotic hotel

The crab looks guilty. I watch through heavy-lidded eyes as it scuttles stealthily from shadow to shadow. Keeping against the wall, conspicuous as a fugitive, it sidles towards the door, then makes a dash for the cool interior of my room.

Unhappily for the crab, an unreceptive audience awaits, and just moments later the cleaning lady sends it scurrying back into the heat of the day with a careless flick of her broom. Pleased that I don’t have to get up to remove the crab myself, I close my eyes and with my dangling foot coax my hammock into a gentle swing.

For some, idleness can be dangerous waters. A week in the hot, sleepy Ecuadorian town of Canoa could spool out before you with all the promise of a sojourn in limbo if you don’t have the art of dolce far niente – doing sweet nothing – down pat. Here, hammock swinging and crab watching are perfectly acceptable, and highly recommended, ways to spend the day.

Canoa lies about midway up the Pacific Coast of Ecuador, in the Manabi province. Once an unknown fishing village, today there’s no short supply of hostels and palm-fronded beach bars serving up fresh fruit daiquiris and strong Caipirinhas.

Canoa, however, has managed to remain down-to-earth despite its growing popularity. Unlike other party-hearty beach towns along Ecuador’s coast, you won’t find pool parties or tacky laser shows here.

It was at the tail end of a day characterised by the usual chaos and miscommunication I’d come to associate with travel in a foreign country that my travel partner and I arrived in Canoa.

My fledgling Spanish and desperate hand signals managed to get us from nearby Montañita to Canoa via a route that required no less than five separate busses.

Only the goodwill of the Ecuadorian people, who flagged them down and told drivers where to let us hapless chicas off, saw us complete a journey that should have been a few hours shorter and a whole lot simpler.

Ravenous and exhausted, as soon as we’d dumped our bags at Coco Loco hostel, we deposited our travel-weary bodies on the deck of a beach-facing restaurant.

A Latin American speciality, ceviche is ubiquitous on the Ecuadorian coast. Always served cold, ceviche de camaron is blanched shrimp marinated in a fresh salsa accompanied by chilli sauce and fried plantain. For a refreshing seaside lunch on a hot day, you can’t do better. And right away, something about the combination of the cold, citrusy ceviche, the clink of our beer glasses and the hot wind blowing off the beach instantly took us down a gear.

After seven weeks of travelling through Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador – trekking, fending off altitude sickness and enduring multiday bus journeys – we breathed in the tropical afternoon atmosphere and felt the first magical tingle of Canoa’s restful spell creep over us.

Canoa’s fun beach break, warm water and beautiful weather make it a magnetic spot for travelling surfers. Surfboards are for rent all over town and telltale dripping board shorts hang from the railings of almost every hostel. It’s idyllic, however, it was with a far more docile activity that we whiled away our days: beach walking.

At low tide the beach is a wide, wet runway. Colours in the sand patterned the shore; the off-white pale cut with gleaming black in zigzags and swirls. Daily we’d walk its length, wading calf deep into the water to cool our tiring legs, then diving beneath the waves when the heat became too much.

From morning to midday we’d wander, aimlessly collecting delicate pansy shells and smooth pebbles. We spent the cool nights building fires on the beach and drinking cheap rum mixed with Coke and limes, transfixed as wolves by a misshapen amber moon. We’d talk until the early hours, search in vain for lost sandals and wake thirsty the following morning with jumbled memories and sheets full of sand.

Days passed in this glorious stupor of lassitude and laziness, until we woke late one morning to find a well-groomed chestnut horse tethered to the hammock trees.

Our morning walk revealed a village electrified with an expectant buzz. It was Canoa’s 405th birthday, and we were about to find out that the sleepy little town does indeed have a wild side.

If there’s one thing that can shake up a Thursday afternoon, it’s a band of rowdy cowboys. Canoa’s version of a wild birthday party had drum majorettes, marching bands and a posse of real-life cowboys astride high-strung, beautiful steeds sweeping through town in a loud and colourful parade.

The Andean working cowboys of Ecuador are known as chagras, and putting on a show for the townsfolk is a popular tradition. In many parts of South America, horses remain a big part of everyday life. Still used today for transport and work, the relationship between horse and man is respected and celebrated in Ecuadorian culture. The best known and most spectacular display of horsemen is el paseo del chagra, an annual festival held in Machachi, south of the capital Quito. El paseo is a traditional gathering of chagras signifying the round-up and bringing home of cattle scattered throughout the highlands by a legendary eruption of the Cotopaxi volcano in the 1800s.

Showing off their horses and traditional clothing is absolutely central to el paseo. The chagras dress to the nines, replete with bright woollen ponchos, coloured scarves, beautifully detailed hats and ornate saddles and bridles. The horses are encouraged to prance and frisk as much as possible – the equine equivalents of engine revving and wheel spinning.

Canoa’s own version of el paseo del chagra, held on the dusty, palm-lined road paralleling the beach, surely did the horsemen of Machachi proud.

The boom of the parade boys’ drums drowned out our heartbeats as cowboys wheeled their showy mounts around in clouds of dust. Between swigs of tequila they’d slap their horses’ flanks with coils of rawhide rope, and the animals’ eyes would roll, foam flecking their muzzles as they champed on their bits. They spun and stamped and tossed their heads and long manes rippled over thick, arched necks stained dark with sweat. The cowboys, suave and proud astride their careening paso finos, touched their hats to onlookers who stared, quite frankly, in awe.

Their revelry continued throughout the day, and each time the sudden crack of hooves rang out like warning shots we’d dart from the path of a drunken cowboy tearing down the street, chaps flapping and ropes swinging. A vacant area in the back of town was transformed into a carnival ground with live music, fried sausage stalls, rickety fair rides less predictable than the horses themselves and plenty of local liquor on offer.

Later, dazed and bewildered in the wake of the action, we followed the hoof prints of the departed horses along the beach. As the evening slowly darkened over a silver-plated ocean, calm again descended upon Canoa.

But for those tell-tale prints left tracking the sand, it was almost as if the day’s events had been nothing more than a strange and garish fever dream – one we’d recount and retell in the nights to come as we sipped our soothing rum. - Weekend Argus

Get our new, free Travel newsletter - subscribe here...