WHO SAYS NOTHING EVER HAPPENS IN BAHÍA? (No. 2)
Bahía de Caráquez, Ecuador, 27 August 2007

Bahía is known to be a safe and quiet beach town on Ecuador’s sandy Pacific coast. Crime is not unknown here, one supposes, but it is such a positive contrast to, say, Quito or Guayaquil, that some have even called the Bahía the “Mayberry of Ecuador”.

The schools up in the Andes have been out for the last month or more and Bahía is at present full of Quiteños who are either here to use their beach condos and beach bungalows or are just driving through. Out on the Rio Chone there are lots of water-ski power-boats around as well as those ubiquitous yellow bananas saddled with children, the boys jumping up and down and the girls screaming, also being towed around by speedboats. The line-up of cars waiting to cross the Rio Chone estuary on one of the barges – during the high tourist season they have been using two ferries every day and well into the night to handle the traffic – is already fairly long by early morning. When locals take the kids swimming, thereby joining the out-of-town visitors, the beaches both on the river and on the sea side of the Bahía peninsula are well populated. This happens especially on weekends and if it is sunny and it happens even though, for people from the coast, this is deepest mid-winter. While the school kids from the sierras get their vacation break now, the costa kids take their long school break from Christmas onwards. Then it’s the rainy season, which by some sort of perverse logic means there is much more sunshine, and it gets much hotter. At present, one Ecuadorian lady told us, (i.e., now that it is verano, “summer” in Spanish), the weather is, of course quite chilly. So the mountain Ecuadorians head down to the beach. Are you following this?

Bahía de Caraquéz carries the self-assumed sobriquet “Eco-Ciudad” or Eco City. The city administration tries to sort trash into bio and non-bio pickups, undertakes reforestation and clean-up projects and the restoration of mangroves. Motorized traffic in town is supposed to be kept to a minimum by the use of tricicletos or tricycle cabs. You spot them along the main streets. People actually use them too. Of course, there are yellow motorized cars as well and they have several cab ranks around town and you can hail them as por puesto taxis (shared cabs). Everything is pretty cheap: 50¢ to a buck will get you anywhere.

The tricicleros, the tricycle cabbies, are probably amongst the poorest in the area. They rely on their earnings to feed their families in a region where jobs are few. But, like the rickshaw drivers in India that are being pushed aside by motorcycle rickshaws, moto-taxis are gaining a foothold here too. In Bahía itself, you won’t see them because the city wants to keep its eco image and keeps them out. But across the river in San Vincente they are pretty common now. There are various kinds of home-made and factory-built moto-taxis so now, if you don’t mind sitting behind a smelly motorcycle, you won’t have waste any of your very valuable time riding silently along in a regular tricicleta.

But all this modernization is causing a reaction amongst the tricicleros over in San Vincente. A couple of months ago, soon after we arrived back in Bahía from Venezuela, there was another flare-up between the moto-taxi operators and the tricicleros. Apparently there was some skirmishing, the riot police were called out, things got out of hand, and a local triciclero from Bahía, a fairly young man who was taking part in the “event”, was shot several times by police. Things seemed to have come to a stop after that. Riot police with brand-new uniforms and riding brand-new riot vehicles were evident around town and over in San Vincente. Police presence was a bit intensified and you could see the Policia driving around town in their up-to-date white Chevrolet SUV’s with bubblegum machines on top and “Servir y protegir” painted on the sides. (Los Angeles has this too though it is considered irreverent to ask just whom they are actually serving and/or protecting.) Tricicleros are cast into the role of rick-breakers. Moto-taxi drivers are the spearhead modernisers.

Who says nothign ever happnes in Bahía?