Whale Hunting...I mean watching

So after seeing our friends´awesome pics of whale watching tours, we decided we couldnt miss out on the humpback whale migration.  After a long bus ride, we checked into our on the beach 8 dollar per person hotel, only to be scolded later by every Israeli in town for paying 50 cents too much.  That night we found the Israeli restaurant in town, Tierra Promenada, with great food and the best fresh pita we´ve tasted outside of Israel.  The owner was an awesome guy, and set us up the next day for a whale watching tour which was 25 dollars for guaranteed whales...if you dont see them they take you out until you see them or till you puke from sea sickness.

So we headed out the next day and after a few picture opportunities with some recently cut, but not yet beheaded, sharks and marlins we began our journey to find moby dick and crew.  Sure enough we suddenly spotted some whale breath shooting straight up in the air, and next thing we know we saw a whole group of whales swimming vey nearby.  It was really awesome, though after the Galapagos we were sort of hoping for some swimming with the whales or at least a whale or two jumping over the boat...but no such luck.

When we got back to town, we spotted our friend Evi from the Chabad at Quito, and joined him for some surf lessons the next day (which was quite painful for Sarit since she was unintentionally doing flips off the board...but at least she got on). 

That Shabbat we went to a dinner and lunch organized by the owners of the Israeli restaurant.  It was absolutely amazing.  There were maybe 50 people there, with tefillah (there were 3 other Yemenites so things obviously got pretty crazy)  and songs, and the food was the best we had since the beginning of the trip....chicken, fish, challah, pita, jachnun, chamin, and our first taste of the amazing, yet disgusting looking, grandilla fruit.

Later that night, Sarit was feeling tired so she went to sleep since we had a 5AM bus the next day towards Peru, but Gilad decided to check out the highly advertised ¨full moon party.¨  Unfortunately the party was really full of crap and Gilad caught the first bus back out.  We guess no one else felt the same since there was only one other person on the bus, who was carrying bongos, high on cocaine supposedly, and informed Gilad that he got out of Banos just in time since the neighboring volcano had just erupted that morning. 

After that it was off to fix the broken alarm clock once again and to wake up at 4:30 for our 5AM bus out of town and towards Peru (thanks Evi for the wake up call!)