The Surfers Journal
Light / Dark
I needed a hat.
Let me explain: My working quiver doesn’t travel well. Lifeguard atrocities. Park helmets (sisal piths favored by landscape workers). Sweat-stained Resistols.
All sensible choices for the desert and Med zones I tend to favor—Köppen climate zones B and C. Problem was, my 2023 docket was slammed with joints more Kipling than Ed Abbey. Monsoonal, Aguirre, the Wrath of God waypoints. Tampico. Holguín. Las Terrenas. The call was for something durable but not out of place in the zócalo. REI, avid-outdoorsman, recycled-synthetic lids? Claro que no. The obvious play was for something with a modest brim, yet wide enough for torrential night ops. Foldable and crushable. Something time-honored. Something Panama. Would I present as some Tony Montana manqué or, worse, a cruiseship boomer? Fifteen years ago, I might have cared. Now, it’s pure function lust.
A research tumble led me to Ecuador. “Panama hat” is a misnomer. The original, the finest, the superfino, all hail from a small town called Montecristi, where they are grown, woven, blocked, and shipped worldwide. Like everything exquisite and handmade, the pricing can be astronomical—thousands of dollars and up. Yet a perfectly fine roll-up in a small cedar tube—not much larger than a Toblerone chocolate bar—can be had for under $200 if you can teleport to Ecuador.
Toggling the map to Montecristi, near the central-coast tuna port of Manta, the scales fell from my eyes. I recalled the name. Manta used to be the home of a wave rivaling Chicama for length. Indeed, a friend once lived there as a fishing consultant in the ’70s. He had surfed the screwfoot paradise at San Mateo before the harbor construction cut it in half.
Proceeding in the modern lazy manner, I had a look using the IG location feature. Clean blue waves fractalized on my phone screen. Tellingly, these were peaks I’d never seen or heard of before. The photos were all authored by a Francisco Herrera. I DMed him at once. Herrera said that no surf magazine had ever visited Manta. I booked a flight. I can’t speak to how the big-cheese online dick swingers bird-dog travel stories, but weird curiosity with an overlay of horde avoidance has never done anyone dirty.
Señor Herrera was gracious and receptive. He invited me to Manta with no strings attached. He’s a businessman in the bottled-water trade and a community pillar. His wife works in the mayor’s office, and his brother is the national minister of transportation. He scheduled a hole so he could show me around. I knew the waves were there. I’d seen the shots. I was looking forward to boiling the bones of the Ecuadorian coast, swimming in the hazards and surprises and vegetable smells. That would not present any difficulty, said Herrera. Neither, from a look at his file, would an article. Hell, one could fill 20 pages with nary a word.
I started in Lima, Peru, my third visit there that year. That place has a hold on me. The two-hour flight to Guayaquil was routine, right down to the traditional Ring of Fire earthquake the city had experienced the day before. A fresh El Niño was also flooding the backfield with Old Testament downpours. Dropping out of the clouds, the reveal was shocking. The rancid-looking Rio Guayas was in flood, all manner of king-size flotsam— some of it recently deceased—threatening navigation. The city itself looked disassembled: an ad hoc, sopping warren of unplanned and ill-conceived structures tracking off to some drizzly vanishing point. Picture post-Katrina New Orleans. The runway lay under a scrim of standing water. The jet hydroplaned for a nauseating moment.
At the taxi stand, things failed to improve. Garbage piles. Gouts of sewage erupting from storm drains. Glued-out homeless patrolling just across the street. Guayaquil, to my none-too-delicate sensibilities, was a three-alarm hellhole.
I love such places. Presaging the social media rat-outs that had aided my research, a mentor of mine famously said, “In the future, the only adventure will be found in cities.”
“Only” is a hell of a word, but he wasn’t wrong. Freedom, anonymity, value, comfort (when you need it): All are on offer in most Latin American cities. US and Western European metros are hopelessly played, locked in a miasma of indefensible expense, news cycle me versus you, and the ennui borne by manufactured outrage. LatAm somehow defies such banal orthodoxy.
Whether posting up for three nights or three months, there’s a recipe for success down south—a punch list. First, find the best old-school hotel bar in town. This will be your base of operations. Then, rout out a steakhouse/parrilla/churrascaria. Next, locate a barber, a driver, and a local fixer. This last can double as a bodyguard if you don’t know how to take a knife away from someone. That’s it. Grease all of these providers liberally. Assuming you have working Spanish and common sense (phone stashed unless within a business; hotel keycard, currency, and a single non-debit credit card in front pocket; a full Zippo), you’re good.
Herrera arranged for my driver, who arrived from distant Manta. An underworld pal hipped me to my fixer, whom we can call Remilio. Remy was from Guayaquil. He’d immigrated to Miami, enlisted, and done two tours with the Marines. Martial life had stuck. He rolled with a buzzcut, a mil-spec backpack, and a telescoping, whiplike baton. That horrible thing lived in his pocket, never leaving his grip. Guns are illegal in Ecuador. Predictably, only crims and cops have them. Knives, too, are outlawed, but far more common. Remy had security papers, but was authorized for only the whip. He brandished it no fewer than three times on our walks. A shark can smell blood from a quarter mile away. Remy could smell something looking to spill ours from double that. I’m low-key vigilant, but Remy looked through walls. He told me that the baton had taken many pelts. I assured him that, like Ovid, I sang only of love and would not invite confrontation. He rolled his eyes and made me walk in the street, thus avoiding the doorways.
Two days later, I dropped down to the street outside my hotel to WhatsApp my driver for the trip to Manta. I sat on my carry-on outside the foyer. A vendor was on the curb, selling sundries from a cart. A grinning skell pedaled past him, playfully tossing an empty plastic water bottle. It bounced lightly off the head of the vendor, who immediately called after him, urging him to come back—as if he wanted to catch up with this friend from the streets.
When the cyclist returned and rolled to a stop, the vendor reached into his cart, withdrew a sharpened piece of rebar, and stabbed him in the gut. Falling off the bike, the skell clawed at his stomach, a confused look on his face. The city street was busy with pedestrians. None stopped. The cyclist continued to bleed out on the asphalt as my driver pulled up.
The drive to Manabí, Manta, and Herrera, toward the procurement of my hat, was uneventful but educational. Over the course of several hours, the driver related the story behind each poblado we drove through: These are mango orchards. Here they sell cheese bread. Notice all of the Chinese motorcycles the farmers use instead of horses. These wooden bowls they are selling are from native trees. Here is where the truckers stop for girls. This is Montecristi, and here is your hat vendor. And, right at the three-hour mark, here is Manta.
You could actually smell the difference between this oceanside city and the delta of Guayaquil. Manta is clean, salt-cured. Tuna clippers and an organized shipping terminal. Faint notes of nearby agriculture, loamy and rich. Restaurants clad in the trendy horizontal lumber, “ ____&____” style that was popular in the US a few years ago. Pádel clubs, players enjoying a cocktail between sets or chukkers or whatever they call them. Once free of Guayaquil, Ecuador took on a hopeful, commerce-driven glow.
I joined Herrera the next day at his Puríssima bottling plant. His justly placed civic pride was in full cry. He had a youthful face, a trace of mustache, and the resigned air of a man used to solving South American logistical issues.
“My friend,” he told me, “Manta is really on the verge of great things.”
Taking me to his upstairs office, he directed me to look out the window.
“That’s the airport right there,” he said. “They just announced the first international flights from Panama City. For the first time, surfers can fly without having to stop in Guayaquil or Quito.”
Those familiar with the country know that most surfers concentrate their efforts well south of the city, in the Salina-to- Montañita zone. Herrera hopes that surf travelers will find his hometown the sort of undercover treasure that he was raised on.
“I started surfing in the late ’80s on big boards my brothers had,” Herrera said. “But I really got into bodyboarding. The best wave in town is El Escondido at Playa Murciélago. It’s a full tube. It’s a north- and west-swell spot, like most of the waves around here.”
It’s also the main beach in town, marked by a promenade and beach services. Beginners and townsfolk at El Medio beach look right into the maw when the refractory hell-wave is on the chew. Rabid spongers lock down the top-loaded beast with little conflict. The sand slab defies all but pro-level stand-up cats, and those are in short supply here. Herrera said that the jewel of the area is found just out of town, near a stretch of beachside villages. We made plans for a survey.
Driving south the next morning, we stopped at the overlook for the famed left at San Mateo. Inside of the jetty, clean, knee-high lefts defined the bar. If you blurred your eyes, you could fill in the point-of-yore’s entirety and grasp what once was. In season, it still offers a mirror-image, Santa Barbara sandbar deal: sucking, hollow-as, backless pits. Watching this heritage spot, Herrera spoke about his start behind the lens.
“I started practicing photography at the beginning of the 2000s, with analog cameras and camcorders. It always remained a secondary activity for me, since the main thing was surfing good waves,” he said. “With the arrival of better equipment in the digital era, I started getting more active. Taking photos and surfing mentally gives me a different perspective of the spots—the nature, the people, and the entire environment. This is why I greatly prefer surf landscape photography. I also take action photos, but I think a perfect lineup or a solitary peak surrounded by nature and magical conditions fills the soul.”
He went on to catalog how he loved to document the setups we’d soon see: the precise swell and wind demands, how unpeopled they were, the opportunities for investment and how that would benefit the local economy. He wanted to make the best-possible impression of his home, overlooked for so many decades.
While my translation does him no service, Herrera was just that earnest-sounding in person. Every conversation was marked by a kind of relaxed fervor. I wanted to ask him if he was at all concerned about opening the floodgates, looking to drop personal experience. I told him that it’s our mode to tread lightly, favoring allusion over guidebooks. He looked at me as if he’d never heard anything so absurd. Stepping back, you can see how the country has more important fat in the fire. Life-and-death shit. It’s beyond national pride. It’s more a matter of survival.
What might feel like chamber-of-commerce boosterism hits different in Ecuador, a country that has its work cut out for it. Security remains the prime concern. A record glut of coca in neighboring Colombia and Peru has attracted transnational players from Mexico to the Balkans. Then there’s the crushing Venezuelan diaspora and its Tren de Arugua gangsters. The three have all but overtaken the country, assassinating politicos, taking control of prisons, and firehosing millions in bribes and influence peddling. For Herrera and his family, it’s a hairball proposition. Tourism, surf or otherwise, is a rare ray of hope.
Descending from a cloud jungle half an hour later, we arrived in the little fishing town of San Lorenzo. Moments later, we were buzzed through the gate of the Keith Keller compound. An East Coast surfer with a modeling/acting background, Keller met his Ecuadorian wife in NYC. The lifelong surfer moved with her to her home country, launching a surfboard company featuring his shapes, Mineral Surfboards.
Behind the gate, a handful of hardwood-accented, custom two-story houses surrounded a cabana and swimming pool. The backdrop was lush, with swarms of butterflies and exotic birds flitting. Waves as seen in these accompanying photos lay down a dirt path. If I got mercantile and vulgar, you would laugh at the amount such an airbrushed van mural of a situation goes for. I’ll write the figure on a slip of paper and pass it under the table.
We relaxed in the shade of the cabana, where Keller and Herrera exchanged news of a fresh swell. Their lovely wives, legs tucked under them, exchanged child-rearing reports with glasses of juice in their hands. It could have been a scene from anywhere green and happily lassitudinous: White Mischief–era Nairobi, or Pavones in the ’80s.
Making plans for the remainder of the week in hail-of-vowels Spanish, I noted their concern for my impressions. They needn’t have worried. The photography, as ever, would do the grunt work. Hat in hand, I remained along for the ride.
To read more from Scott Hulet, pick up a copy of Flow Violento, an omnibus of his collected work, available now at surfersjournal.com.
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