Montañita is a popular place for tourists from Guayaquil (the capital of Ecuador) to visit. For less than $40 per person, someone can get to Montañita, spend two nights here, party and hang out on the beach, and return home. That includes transportation, lodging, food, and booze, and there is quite the weekend warrior crowd. Surprisingly, not everyone that comes here knows how to swim. More surprising, people that do not know how to swim like to play in the waves. Several times a month one of these people gets picked up by a wave and taken out to sea. As far as I know, no one has died yet, but there have been plenty of close calls. Usually there are some surfers in the water and they quickly save the drowning tourists. If not, the town is so small and word spreads so quickly that a hundred people have time to run to the beach and watch the whole episode. Yesterday I was lucky enough to be on the beach, and it was a pretty funny sight. A couple surfers had saved the victim, but word had spread in the town so fast that about 15 "macho" local guys came running on to the beach to help out. Two of them stripped off their shirts and went dashing into the water like a scene from Baywatch. It didn´t matter that the victim had already been saved by surfers. When they got to her, she was already back to waist deep water, yet they dramatically carried her in.
As a side note, I tried running to the end of the beach yesterday evening. After an hour and fifteen minutes, I gave up, went to a road, and took a local bus home. Mi padre informed me over dinner that night that the beach continues at least 80 kilometers from where I started to a town called Las Salinas. I won't be running to the end any time soon.
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