Las Tunas, Ecuador

       I remember watching a video in science class called the Power of Ten, where the camera zooms out and out and out from a picnic in Chicago until the galaxy is just a speck on the screen. This was the first time I had a real sense of how tiny I was in relation to the universe. It made me feel like I was falling through a vast unknown, and also like I had an infinite world to explore. What if I could nudge the camera lens and zoom in on different parts of the planet, to see what were people doing over there, across the patches of blue water? They seemed so close, and so far away. I’d like to think this memory from middle school is part of why I’ve lived abroad since 2018, and why, a year ago, I quit my job to travel full time with my sister.

       Of all the countries you’ve been to so far, which is your favorite? This is the question I get asked most often, and my answer is always the same: Ecuador.

       Despite how small it is, I haven’t seen much of the country. Last February, I arrived at a small town on the coast called Las Tunas and pretty much didn’t leave for three months. I didn’t go to Cuenca, famous for its architecture, or climb Cotopaxi, the most popular volcano, or go to the Galapagos or see the Amazon rainforest. Instead, I spent almost every day within walking distance of where I was sleeping, in a place with a population of less than a thousand and almost no tourist attractions to speak of, besides the endless ocean.

       I first heard about Las Tunas from Iris, one of my best friends. She’s a digital nomad from France who has spent the last four winters there, pulled back each year by some magnetic force. Whenever she tried to explain, the words would get stuck. “English isn’t my first language,” she’d say, although she frequently uses English to express complex emotions. “It’s like…my second home.” Why? What makes this place so special? The conversation always ended the same way: “just come and see it for yourself.”

         My sister and I arrived at night. It had rained all day, so the small roads were muddy. When the car finally pulled up to an ill-lit entrance, I remember feeling disappointed. That’s it? I’d been building an image of paradise in my head, a utopia where all of the negative parts of myself could dissipate, but this was just another hostel. For a while, I was slightly let down by almost everything in the town. It was too hot, the nearest grocery store was a bus ride away, the scent of my blood sent the mosquitos into a feeding frenzy, and learning to surf next to my gymnast sister was demoralizing. Worst of all, there was nothing to do but sit around and wonder why I wasn’t enjoying myself. 

       It took me a full month to start appreciating the pace of life in Las Tunas, the way people treated time like water, accepting its flow without trying to control it. Once I let go of the idea that I could plan out my day, things began to change.

       Every evening, we gathered to watch the sun say goodbye. We sat on logs pulled into rows, like church pews, and chatted as the sky put on its show. On the first day there, I went down a path that took me through a swamp of mosquitos, and arrived with over twenty fresh bites. When I saw the sky, my skin stopped itching. I forgot to be irritated. Pink, green, even purple, streaked across the space above the moving water. The sun was outlined in red, floating above the waves that rushed to meet the shore. Even the people who saw this all the time would occasionally look up from their conversations and gasp, their faces going soft and childlike. Then they’d turn back and find themselves being a little more open, a little more kind, to the person next to them.

       The first time I broke past the ocean waves that roared several meters high, I was on my surfboard. Past the chaos of getting hit in the face over and over by walls of water, there is a startling calm. The people on shore were blurry dots, barely real, and I was here in this gigantic bathtub, swaddled in every shade of blue. I felt completely and comfortingly alone. The sun was flirting with the water, and the water flirted back. The lower half of the world undulated as the light drew its rainbow fingers across everything. I wished I had my phone, but I was also glad I didn’t have my phone. Sliding into the water, I sank low enough that my eyes were right at the surface, like a crocodile’s. It was intimate, the way the light caressed the water that caressed me. I closed my eyes to feel it, and quickly opened them again to an entirely different view. The sun was moving, the water was moving, I was moving, and yet the world was so still.

       One night, someone lit a fire to cook the fish they’d just caught. People could see the light on the beach from miles away, and soon a group of us were gathered. I stood close enough to feel my skin crackle in a pleasurable way, slowly turning to feel the warmth spread, not dissimilar to what the men were doing to the fish. Soon, I was holding one between my fingertips, teeth crunching through skin and salt and soft flesh, grease running down my arms off my elbows into the sand. Anyone with access to fish, fire, and saltwater has felt this way. I was eating a meal that could have been made by the first humans. Afterwards, hands sticky, face hot from the fire, I felt so grateful to be alive that I threw my head up and looked at all the stars and laughed. The people around me didn’t think I was crazy, because they felt it too.

       Much of life in Las Tunas is spent outdoors, looking at the water, and talking to whoever happens to be nearby. A solo walk often turns into an unplanned conversation which turns into a spontaneous group activity. This is partly because when someone new joins the group, they say hello to everyone. They take time to physically touch every single person, a fist bump a handshake or a hug, on both arrival and departure. The first time someone crouched down at a bonfire to give me a fist bump and tell me their name, I was startled. I had been in the middle of a conversation. I saw them again at sunset a few days later, and again when walking to buy a coconut from someone’s house, and again at the malecón watching surfers. By the time we finally struck up a conversation, we were no longer strangers.

       On Sunday, everyone eats encebollado. It’s a salty fish onion soup paired with lime juice, cilantro, and chifles, the thin plantain strips that come with everything. I usually burn my mouth a little on the first bite out of overeagerness, and then again on the second bite because it’s worth it. There’s so much tuna in this $3 dish that after I tip the last bite into my mouth, I feel a satisfaction that can only be expressed by a burp and then a sigh. The nourishment reaches my toes. In Las Tunas, there’s only one encebollado place, run out of someone’s house. It’s only open on Sundays for breakfast, between 8-11am, or until they run out. Half the town flows through, chatting on the doorstep before leaving with the telltale yellow bags of hot fish onion soup swinging from their arms. 

       Iris and her friend Nico, an eleven-year-old boy, invented a game using what they were able to find on the street: fifty beer bottle caps, a bunch of half broken wooden boards, and an old tennis ball. One team wins if they knock out all enemy players using the ball. The other team wins if they flip all the bottle caps before getting knocked out, using the wooden boards as shields, or bats. There were over thirty of us playing, and although half of us were adults, we acted like kids, running around, screaming, and accusing the other team of cheating. Random people walking by joined and were soon shouting with us. The best was when someone threw hard and missed, and the opposing team would screech in triumph, frantically flipping caps before the ball could be retrieved. Afterwards, sweaty and happy, we pooled our quarters to buy fresh passionfruit popsicles from someone’s aunt who lived down the road.

       I think I understand now why it was so hard for Iris to describe Las Tunas, and why she keeps coming back. It’s the kind of place that teaches you to live in the moment, to connect, and to let the beauty of the world in. It’s the kind of place where clichés feel true.

       This is not a blog post about why you should visit Las Tunas. In reality, there’s nothing special about Las Tunas. What made it special to me, and perhaps to Iris as well, is how different it is to what I’m used to. I’ve always lived in cities, surrounded by ambitious, productive, future oriented people. Staying in a place like Las Tunas for so long forced me to pay attention to a part of myself I had long neglected, a part of myself that I’m still learning about. This blog post isn’t about why you should visit Las Tunas; it’s about how traveling, like other new, uncomfortable experiences, has the power to change you, especially if you stick around for long enough.