The bus takes us on the first big step over ten hours and 3,000 metres in altitude down to the Pacific. The reclining seats and legroom are pure paradise. I work, blog and edit videos. The sun cream implodes and the Gopro no longer opens. In Santa Marianita, barking dogs chase my taxi to the small Punta La Barca hostel right on the hillside above Kite Beach.
Three of the neighbour’s fighting dogs attack me on my first walk. One of them bites my foot good and hard. Antibiotics iron out the subsequent infection. I’ve had four dogs in my life, I’ve made Nepalese temple dogs sing and hellhounds keep quiet. I’m good with dogs. There’s only one thing that helps with these fucking fighting dogs.
I get a stick and a stone and pass the now even more aggressive dogs in reverse, swinging the stick without biting. There are fags for sale in the sixth of the eight mini-towns. Well, sometimes. After half an hour, I find the only open restaurant. There are snarling fighting dogs with fresh, deep wounds everywhere. I sneak across the beach past the dogs and back to the hostel. The village is deserted, only a few Ecuadorians in a holiday home are drinking so loudly that they don’t even hear my third loud question for directions. Or don’t want to.
The Punta de la Barca hostel is lovely and the Dutch/Ecuadorian owners are also kiters and real spaetzle. I have a whole dorm to myself again, only a nice Leipzig permanomade and kiter is still there. The panoramic view of the Pacific over a few chickens and geckos from the workplace couldn’t be better. I work in the morning and kite in the afternoon.
The hot black lava sand on the beach is interspersed with large round pebbles. At high tide, the beach is almost completely gone, the shore is fortified in many places or the houses that have slipped away are abandoned. Santa Marianita is a real thermal machine due to the extremely dry, sandy hinterland and the relatively cool Pacific Ocean in front of it. As soon as the sky opens up and it gets warm enough, the engine gets going. Unfortunately, as a kiter I am increasingly becoming a bio-indicator of global warming. Heat actually means more air movement. But here and this year, the wind is once again far below standard – as it has been at all worldwide destinations in recent years.
On the first day, 16 knots of sideonshore blow comfortably from the southwest over endlessly smooth waves up to 1.5 metres high in pleasant 10-metre intervals. The new Slingshot Bar works well with the Ozone Edge 13 – it was just a shame to lose a pigtail on the beach. The nearest kiteshop should be in Mancora, Peru. It’s only 600 kilometres away. Improvisation rules.
The Permanomade teaches me two ways to launch and land myself – about time in my 19th year of kiting. You also need to launch and land yourself here. One kilometre further on, four kiters are out. But I have the top two kilometres of beach all to myself. First kite session of the trip. Finished late in the afternoon and washed clean by a few waves, back up the mountain to the hostel.
The next day, armed with a stick and a stone, I take a closer look at the village. Fighting dogs one to three are just offline. The fact that the other neighbours’ really big black dog only ever bites locals (none of his 10 victims so far have been visitors) doesn’t particularly reassure me. On the way back from a rather unsuccessful search for food, two dogs attack me again. Allegedly they would only bark. Sorry, I have no problems with gestures and facial expressions! The first one immediately gets a good whack over the head with a stick and trolls off, the second one devotes himself to my sacrificed dinner.
Especially in poor places, it’s usually easy for me to concentrate on the little nice things among the dirt. The laughter of the children. A flower by the roadside. Or the scent from a kitchen window. In Santa Marianita, I fail in this respect. The turbo virus that has banished half the village to the loo for a day in the last few days also caught me on the last day despite antibiotics. Next!
Frank Woelky, born in 1973. Kitesurfer since 1998. Since 2006, I have been combining kitesurfing and web design on trips lasting several months off the beaten track.