When we had that real holiday feeling in Montañita & Olón

Yesterday when we left Montañita we felt as if we really didn't want to leave, even though we already had spent 7 nights here, we coulee easily stayed for a few more days. We just had the best week here. 

Montañita is a little surf paradise and has apparently expanded massively in just 10 years. Back then it was just a little village where lots of surfers went to catch the really good waves. Now however, it's still a place that surfers love, but it's also a place that lots of tourists loves and most people come here for the big party scene they have going on. Walking around in downtown Montañita by night, really felt like being in Ayia Napa again. So many bars, restaurants and buzzing party people everywhere.

During our week here, we stayed at the holiday park Las Brisas Montañita. The location was perfect for us who were after a more quite area. There was a 10 minute walk from the busy town centre, down on a gravel road, where many other hostels were also located. But ours was one of the ones furthest away from all the noise.

We really found everything we needed only on this road called Barrio el Tigrillo, which is super easy to find since basically everything is within walking distance here. Supermarkets, fruit & veg shop and this cool little cafe which we found to be very vegan friendly with a Salad Bar as their main dish. For $3,50 we got to choose 7 ingredients for a salad and among other yummy things you could choose there were quinoa, black beans and avocado. So nice with a salad bar nearby when the weather is so hot that I definitely don't feel like having a hot meal.

We picked up a really great daily routine for our stay by this beautiful coast as well. It is really tempting to lose yourself into the party life with everyone else since you're surrounded by it all the time. But a holiday in Montañita really doesn't have to be all crazy party time. We discovered that it is really easy to find more quite spots to be able to have that chilled holiday.

Everyday we escaped for a few hours and went to the neighbour village Olón. The first day we walked there and back, since it's only about 4 km apart. But with that crazy heat in the day, it was a very exhausting walk, so instead we took the bus for only 50 cents each.

Olón is much more quite and smaller than Montañita. It feels like an up-and-coming place though, since there are lots of construction work going on and the beach is just beautiful and with way less people than the beach in Montañita.

We went here everyday mostly because I found a place where I could do Spanish lessons for $7 an hour. The first day we visited Olón, we just happened to run into a sign saying "Spanish lessons" at this hostal called Jungla and inquired about it. Turned out to be cheaper than other language schools around here that you can find online, and my teacher Luana was amazing! She completely let me decide what time I wanted to have the lesson every day and I learned so much just during the 5 hours of Spanish I had with her.

Other than chilling at the beach and studying Spanish, there is not much to do around Olón. There are not much vegan food here either, so we struggled a bit with finding vegan lunch every day but soon gave up and went back to Montañita to try our luck instead.

There are however a couple of options (by the beach they have plenty of little local food places if you are just happy with fries, the local food is unfortunately very often based on chicken, fish or shellfish). One of them is the vegetarian friendly place La Casa Rosa, where they also to acro yoga a couple of nights a week and it's just based on people giving donations.

We only went here for coffee a few times (which is really lush!) so I cannot say much about the food. All I know is that they have a lunch menu that changes daily and the owner and people working here knows exactly what veganism is and can cater for us as well!

It is a really nice little hang out in the owners back garden! So you definately get that homey feeling.

After a couple of days we found a restaurant where the staff was not only super friendly but also, super vegan friendly. They had a set menu for $3 which included soup, main and a juice and when we said we were vegans, the chef was more than happy to prepare a special menu for us with lentil pattis, beans and rice and a delicious veggie soup for starters - so nice!

After the Spanish class, some chilling on the beach and swimming in the crazy wavey sea we usually got back to our accommodation to get ready to go to the more busy Montañita beach for the stunning sunset.

We agreed that this is one of the prettiest sunsets we've seen and for that reason we just couldn't miss out on it one single evening.

When it was time for dinner we didn't have to struggle too much after finding that one of the many food carts served a vegetarian soy burger for $2,50. But, we had to be aware to make sure that the dude making the burgers didn't put and cheese or egg on it.

We found that it is definitely not hard to satisfy a massive burger craving here. Just around the corner from where the soy-burger-food cart was, we found a very vegan friendly small restaurant that had both vegan lentil and chickpea burgers for $3,50. You could also add the combo for an extra $2 and get a drink and fries as well. Again, we just had to make sure that the cheese was removed from the making of the burgers. But the staff knew very well that veganism entails, which always makes everything a lot easier of course.

The burgers were delicious, but pretty dry without any mayo or cheese, so I asked to add avocado which made it much better. Jeez, that avocado really helps to make every meal so much better. Hay Manitas (which I THINK is the name of the restaurant) also have plenty of other options if you want vegan dine, like three different wraps and pizzas. Nothing comes vegan as it is though, so again, beware!

There is also actually on vegan restaurant in Montañita, all other restaurants that comes up on the Happy Cow app are just veg friendly, and expensive (but then again, most restaurants in Montañita are has very expensive food. Drinks on the other hand, much cheaper)

The vegan restaurant is called Amor Infinity and is located on the same road as Hay Manitas. I was so excited to come here after reading all the amazing reviews - and I was especially excited to finally have vegan pizza WITH vegan cheese again. But unfortunately we got a bit disappointed. There are not many options to choose from. There is one breakfast choice, you can order a pizza slice or an empanada for $1,50 each, there is one vegan cake and then there's the Menu of the day for $4 which includes soup, main and a juice.

I guess it wouldn't matter that much that it's a small menu if the Menu of the day changed daily (which I think it is meant to), but during our week in Montañita it never changed ones. We tried it one time and the food was really great! The starter peanut butter based soup with veggies was divine and the main (lentils with rice and empanada with lots melted cheese on top, with pesto and a ratatouille) was even better. I could've eaten 3 plates of it. But since the menu never changed, we didn't feel tempted in having the same dish every night, which is why we unfortunately ditched this place for dinner most evening.

We did however give it more chances since I always want to support the only vegan restaurant in town! The vegan pizza slice would've probably been great if it was served warm and the oreo cake they have on the menu was not available when I asked for it and I that HAS to be good. Instead I got to try a small piece of cake for $2 which was only okay.

Okay this is a very negative review of a place that many people seem to really like, but I guess I just had my hopes up.  On a more positive note - The owner is a really friendly man who lived in Sweden for two years so it was fun speaking some Swedish with him. Also, compared to other restaurants in downtown Montañita area, this place is pretty cheap and I mean, I'm always gonna love a place that serve amazingly good vegan cheese as they do here. It is definitely worth a visit at least ones to try the daily menu. Maybe they just had a low-fantasy week when we were there.

Other than that we found that it's not the easiest thing to find vegan food in Montañita. So it's great to now there is a vegan restaurant as back-up. Most places serve meat-based dishes (especially the cheapest places for some reason..) and the places you do find vegan options in are pretty expensive.

We treated ourselves on our last day and went to Tiki Restaurant & Hostel for dinner, where they have some good options for vegans. On offer this day as well were both the veggie burrito and falafel for $6 each, that we tried and absolutely loved!

Don't know if the size of the portion was worth $6 though. Because of much of the food being pretty pricey, we had to escape to whole restaurant scene more than often during our stay in Montañita. But it didn't matter that much after finding this bakery which makes the most tasty wholemeal loafs for $1. And with cheap avocados everywhere, this bread-and-avocado-thing we've had going on for a long time now, continued.

Not much to say about it.. But we did spend some time in Guyaquil, Ecuador

We left Mancora at 10 am, again with bus company Cruz del Sur, with destination the big busy city of Guyaquil. After about 2 hours on the bus, we stopped by the border and did all that border control stuff. The Peruvians and the Ecuadorians shared office here so you got to leave and enter these countries at the same place. It wasn't that cool feeling of walking over the border over to another country though, the bus did that for us.

The border crossing took about 2 hours and after that we had another 5 hours in the bus before arriving to the humongous bus terminal in Guyaquil. We only chose to stop by here because I had to go for a visa interview at the us embassy in order to be able to visit my brother in Chicago later on this year (because of the changed rules you have to apply for a visa at least 3 months in advance and go through an interview to apply for a tourist visa if you been in Iran after 2011, which I have). Because other than that is not that much to do in this city. It's just really REALLY hot all the time and nowhere around to really go for a swim. 

So we were super stoked just to find that our hostel Dreamkapture had the tiniest little pond of a pool that we took much advantage of.

Other than that we didn't do much while in Guyaquil so I don't have much to report back about. The hostel we stayed at was in an area quite far outside of the actual city center, but it was still a pretty busy area.

We did struggle a lot to find vegan food around here. The restaurants close by were running the same kind of theme; meat, meat and chicken. Most places didn't have one single veggie option even. So we decided to take the matter into our own hands and had my favourite kind of home made meals over here in South America: toasts with avocado. It just can't go wrong and it's the cheapest best lunch to have.

We did however become loyal customers to the only place that actually had vegetarian options, inside of City Mall a few blocks away, which we loved mostly for its awesome air-condition but also because of this little Mexican gem in the middle of the big food court (I usually really don't like food courts, they always makes me feel like I'm sitting in a school cafeteria and it's just not a cosy atmosphere, but hey, if good vegan food is at stake I guess I can tolerate it).

The owner became our best friend immidately when he understood loud and clear exactly what veganism was, and happily changed some of the dishes to become vegan friendly (he had some vegetarian options already on the menu, like enchiladas, burritos etc). I tried the personal copa with loads of guacamole on top of a mix of black beans, mushrooms, green pepper and tomato sauce with nachos on the side. Another night he recommended the Aztec tortilla soup made vegan, which was basically just tomato soup with nachos mixed into it with avocado chunks on top. It sounds so gross to have softened nachos in a soup but it was actually really yum!

Who would have thought that Tijuna Express inside of a big shopping mall would become our favourite place in Guyaquil? 

On of the Mexicans neighbours was the coffee chain Sweet & Coffee which absolutely blew my mind when I tried their Chocolate Frio (cold chocolate milk!) with soy milk because it tastes just like melted chocolate ice cream and I've been craving ice cream for so long in this heat. It's also really rare to be able to find places that has soy milk so only that made me jump of happiness. 

It was a bit expensive though, 4 dollars for a drink that finished in like 5 minutes. But still. You can really tell that it's a bit more expensive here than in Peru and Bolivia. Well at least food wise, accommodation we found is actually cheaper than places we've been to in Peru. 

Another thing I find a bit strange is how they only use US dollars in Ecuador, they do have like their own coins which they don't use in USA, but it's still US dollars. This might be why some stuff cost more here.

Anyway, we left Guyaquil as soon as we could after my interview to head towards the beach side again. This time to the famous surf town Montañita.

Our super relaxing days in Mancora - the last stop in Peru

Getting from Lima all the way to Mancora wasn't the nightmare I had expected at all. It could've been because we were travelling the 19 hour bus journey with Cruz del Sur again and were very lucky to have seats in the front with individual tv screens that had so many movies to choose between. We left Lima at 13:30 in the afternoon and arrived to Mancora the morning after. The only bad thing about the journey was the food that is included in the ticket price. They ask if you want vegetarian or meat, and of course we chose vegetarian and asked if they could prepare a meal without egg and milk aswell, whereas the company said that their vegetarian meals are always made without egg and milk. What a load of bullshit. The dinner we got was rice with omelette and for breakfast we got a bread bun with cheese.. So much for dairy bad egg free.. It was good that we had brought our own snacks aswell!

We did manage to get some good sleep for ones on the bus so we felt ready to explore Mancora as soon as we got off the bus, but that energy soon went away in the heat. 

The town is pretty small and there is a beach that is not the prettiest of beaches, with ALOT of people trying to sell all kinds of things to you and it is very crowded aswell, and pretty crappy to be frank. We had heard that there was a nicer beach if you just continues walking past the pier and started this mission straight away without spending more than 5 minutes on this main beach. 

We walked for what felt like ages, through a really rough area where it just smelled of dead fish, the road was muddy and there were so many mosquitos aswell. We were just close to giving up and realise that we had probably heard wrong - it couldn't be a nice beach past all this shit - but then when we were about to turn back we found a little piece of paradise in Mancora. There were no people trying to sell us stuff, no garbage lying around and the beach was amazing. Because no one else was there!

We had just gone into one of the hotels along the beach and realised that it was completely empty, they had a pool and ice cold drinks to sell so we were sold on this place immidately. It was totally worth going through that stinky, long sweaty road for.

So already the first day we started a routine which we had for all the three days we spent here. I usually really don't like doing exactly the same things every day, but sometimes it is just really nice to do so because it were the most relaxing days we've had on our South America trip - and we really needed these days after everything that had happened.

So every morning we got up, did some yoga and then went to Cafe del Mundo in town, where they had a really good vegan combo deal; ciabatta with avocado, tomato and lettuce served with coffee and juice for 10 soles. Everything was just delicious! The juice was different everyday, the best one was the one with strawberry and banana, yum! The woman in charge there was so friendly aswell which made us wanna come back there even more.

The food in Mancora is pretty pricey (at least eating out, and they don't have a big supermarket, just plenty small ones. They don't even have a hospital or post office for that matter), being a tourist town and all, and so the only vegetarian restaurant that exist have the same sort of prices as anywhere else here really, if not slightly less expensive.

It's called Angela's Vegetairan and is located on the Main Street like everything else. On the Happy Cow app it says that this restaurant is only veg-friendly with one meat dish, but I couldn't find a single item of meat, apart from soy meat. They had so many choices, but it was quite easy deciding in the end anyway because most of the things on the menu was just over our budget (like 25-35 soles). But they have burritos, burgers of different kinds, pizza, pasta, curries, salad, sandwiches and even vegan desserts and gluten free bread!

I tried the pasta with spinach sauce and the second time I asked to add soy meat which was more filling and really amazing! We also tried the soy meat burger and brown rice with veggies and everything tastes divine! Just a shame that you don't get any fries or anything at all really with the burger..

The only fail was when we ordered the falafel as a starter and got this. Not really worth 9 soles. Both the falafel and hummus was just really dry. 

But still, we felt happy going here every night to support the only vegetarian restaurant in town.

So it turned out to be the perfect classic holiday in Mancora; sun, swimming, relaxing and great food. After these days here we were ready for a long-ish bus journey with Cruz deal Sur again, this time to leave Peru and to get to Guyaquil in Ecuador where I am sitting and sweating so much that I feel like I just went for a swim. But I won't bore you with more details just yet.

When we finally made it to sea level - Lima

After leaving the high altitutueds and coming back to the coast I FINALLY start to feel like myself again, wihoo!

 

I don't know if a big part of me feeling better is a placebo effect since I am convinced that it's the altitude that's been giving me all that bad luck, but whatever it is it's good cause I felt like myself again after just a few hours in Lima.

We decided to cheat the fashion backpacker style and take a flight from Cusco to Lima and it saved us a lot of time. I almost screamed when we finally saw the ocean and the coastline. It felt like we'd been away from the sea for ages and it was like seeing a long lost friend again.

We only had a couple of nights to spend in this massive capital so we didn't have time to do that much. I think you'd need like a metro card to be able to see as much of the city as possible, but we limited ourselves to explore just a tiny bit by walking.

We stayed in an area called Chorrillos, which is meant to be a quite area and it's the area next to the more touristy areas of Barranco and Miraflores. Getting there from the airport was pretty hard though, I mean without getting scammed. There are no buses going from the airport, so if you want to take a bus you first have to take a taxi downtown and take the bus from there, same thing with the metro. So the only option really is to take a taxi and prepare to get ripped of. Even though there's a sign in the airport with prices for taxis to all the different areas, it's massively overpriced. To Churrillos it said that it would cost 80-65 soles and of course all the taxi drivers said that we'd had to pay 80, finally we ended up getting one for the lower price of 65, but it's still ALOT of money for a taxi here.

So after that we decided to use our legs and walk the way from Churillos to Barranco to find somewhere to eat, and it didn't take long, only 20 mins or so, and we found this vegetarian restaurant that is in like a train waggon; El Cultural Restaurant Express. It looked really cool, but was a bit disappointing vegan-wise and amount-of-food-for-what-you-pay-wise.

Guy ordered a pizza for 15 soles which looked like a pizza for a baby and there weren't many vegan options at all, so I only had a avocado salad which kept me full for like an hour so on our way back we had to buy popcorn to make us feel better.

Barranco is a really beautiful area, I think it's better than Miraflores which is crazy busy. But then again, there also seem to be a lot more stuff going on in Miraflores. 

Because we stayed in Churrillos we found an accommodation which wasn't too expensive. We looked and looked for decent places to stay around Barranco and Miraflores, but almost everything was out of our budget. So I'm glad we extended the search so that we could find Paipo Bed Breakfast and Surf - because this was truly a great accommodation! It was clean and tidy, good breakfast included (vegan margarine and bread!!) and the stuff were great. We especially loved the owner who even offered us a ride down to Miraflores in his car so we didn't have to walk all that way in the heat.

In Miraflores we went to the first vegan restaurant that had popped up on Happy Cow (there were LOADS of places to choose between from here, but all of them seems to be a bit expensive) - El Jardin de Jazmin. 

This restaurant looked much cooler and nicer than either the staff or the food was. I hate to get disappointed in vegan restaurants, but it wasn't great. The food was pretty average and again, you didn't get a decent amount of food either, especially since it wasn't cheap either we expected to at least walk out and feel full. Yes, there seems to be a pattern in the veggi restaurants in Lima!

But it still taste good. Guy had the lentil burger which he really liked and I had what was supposed to be a combo with aubergine steak and quinoa salad and a lemonade for 19 soles. And yeah, it was good. Not great.

After all the food fail where we had to go somewhere else to get full afterwards, we gave up and in our last night we created our own dinner, which is the best dinner we've had in Lima; wholwheat bread, avocado, olives and Oreos from the local supermarket in Churillos. 

What a feast eh!

We felt ready to leave Lima pretty quickly and got on the bus the next day at 13:30, which was gonna be our home for the next 19 hours, waived goodbye to Lima and feeling really excited about spending our last days in Peru in the little beach town of Mancora.