Cutting slightly inland, the road became no more than a cattle trail through scrub, cactus and brown dust. Nothing moved in the dry landscape except for a few goats and cows. We stopped in the small, poor village of Chanduy, on a cliff overlooking the sea, and listened to an old man in a shack playing guitar, singing local pasillo [passage] music. Most of his songs were about bad loves and women who did him wrong and now were gone — Latin country music played by a Ecuadorian cowboy in a straw Stetson. Out in the bush, a man on a horse with a lasso attached to his saddle herded goats.

|Article contributed by Dominic Hamilton|||