Adventures in Ibarra

On our last weekend off, we took a trip with my friend Sophie, and her husband, to her husband's home-town of Ibarra, in the northern highlands of Ecuador. It was very fun traveling with them as we got to see and do many activities that we would not have known about, or would not have been able to access without a vehicle.

My favorite event of the weekend was when Pablo, Sophie's husband, decided to cook us a crab feast for one of our lunches. We picked up the crabs early in the morning from the market, where they were still live, and tied together in a bundle of 13 or so. Total, was had about 26 crabs, probably brought in fresh from the coast in the early mornign. Pablo preferred to keep them alive until they went into the boiling water, so the real adventure was cleaning the crabs with a scrub brush to get them clean, without getting pinched by the crab. I was a bit tentative at first, letting out a few squeeks and "ahhs" now and then, but eventually I got the hang of it. Occasionally one would get away in the big wash basin, and scurry to the drain, where it would clamp onto the drain grate so tightly that you could not pry it away. The crabs, once scrubbed clean, were a beautiful array of purple, red, and orange.



Our live crabs from the northern coast of Ecuador.

Carefully cleaning each one with Pablo.

 

All finished, ready for cooking.

Eating them was another story. As Mike and I are used to larger bodied crabs, with accompanying shell cracker tools to access the meat, we had small bodied crabs, with only one shell-cracker for the table to share. It is obviously an acquired skill, because Pablo and Sofia skillfully used their teeth the crack the shell, and mouths to suck out the meat. They had devoured a handful of crabs before I had gotten through one and a half, with sore fingers, and crab meat flung all around my plate. They were delicious though.

A few hours later, Pablo's mother heard some clicking in the family dining room, down the hall from the kitchen. She went to investigate and found that one of the crabs had leapt out of the bucket on the floor by the boiling water, while awaiting his turn to be cooked, and had run away, trying to escape his fate. Which he did for about 4 hours, but to no avail, he got eaten later for dinner.

View on our drive up to Ibarra.

Getting to know Lago San Pablo.

Mike holding a falcon at an bird rescue park.

Trying Cuy (Guinea Pig) for the first time.

Volcanic crater lake.

Trying to get an Avocado down from his parent's tree in their back yard.

Re-enacting an Incan sacrifice on a ceremonial sacrifice stone.

Just kidding.

Ibarra by night.