Onward,
I've been following your journeys in Ecuador, particularly down to the coast, with a lot of interest. After you left Otavalo, I was waiting for you to resurface.
Spent about 5 weeks there in the late 1980s. At that time Quito wasn't particularly bustling nor do I remember pollution or concern about crime. We stayed with some friends from Chile who had a house there. Also went into the Amazon region (to what may have been one of the first tourist lodges in the area) and to Cuenca, which was lovely.
From Otavalo, though, we went north to Ibarra and took the train down to the coast ending up in San Lorenzo or Valdez, where the coastal roads south started. Did you consider doing this?
At that time there were no roads in the region. It was either backtrack, I'm remembering, or take the train, which was supposed to be spectacular. From Valdez we were able to take a bus down to Esmeraldas for the night and then transfer to buses that would reach beach communities. My guess is that we remained well to the north of where you were.
At the time I was traveling a lot and had been a number of places where there were either few foreigners (remote areas of Borneo) or political tensions (NW frontier of Pakistan, Bangladesh). Nothing compared in danger or social tension to that part of Ecuador. Enormous disparities in income; I'm remembering that the ancestors of the inhabitants of the marshy northern coastal region were escaped slaves.
To be brief, the train was only way for desperate folks to reach the villages on the western slope of the Andes where life was at a subsistence level (pretty much just rice and bananas). Tickets could be acquired by graft only; we got ours from some saavy Brits. The only way to use the ticket was not to foolishly wait at the station but to go to the shed, wait for the doors to open, and fight your way onto the train as it started to move. Crowds surrounded the train refusing to let it move, the army was called in then departed. I found that my ticket did not come with a seat - a definite inconvenience for a ride of maybe up to 14 hours.
No one, I noticed, in the crowded train (only one car) grazed, even inadvertently, the seat occupied by a man dressed simply but immaculately in a white shirt and black pants. With the departure of the army and the return of the crowd, he suddenly rose, told everyone to leave the car, and collected their tickets. Leave, turn in mine? My boyfriend said no, stay - I choose. Go for or rather with the power seemed sensible. I stepped off the train into a crowd that was turning into a mob and wanted me to move away from the car entrance. My boyfriend, an old SDS organizer, seeing the tension rise joined me and promptly started a rally, which changed the mood of the crowd almost instantaneously.
The mysterious man reboarded us returning my ticket. It wasn't the original; I now had the best seat on the train (front, away from the gear box) formerly occupied by an expat engineer. He wasn't happy but of course just let it go (he did get a seat - just the second best). The train finally left with men clinging to the sides. Most eventually fell off. Never did figure out who the man in the white shirt was. He refused to let me thank him or talk to me.
The coastal town was a seat of shacks joined by boards over mud. Knives were the weapon of choice. (Don't remember what happened to the expat engineers.)
We reached Esmeraldas, the regional town, by bus the next night. I couldn't convince my boyfriend that going in at night - just the 2 of us now with the Brits having peeled off - was problematic enough that it was necessary to figure it out ahead of time. There are times to pay for a decent hotel; we could have paid the bus driver extra to take us right to it. Instead of agreeing to this, we ended up off the bus having a discussion (well, I was listening) about the social dynamics of our relationship.
I pointed out that groups of young men were coming out of the shadows towards us. There was an open gas station behind us and it was about time to run for it. On the way, a cab actually came down the deserted street and I dragged now confused BF into it. He was somewhat mollified when he was told by some guys at the hotel bar that there was a reason that the only "best" hotel in town (then $20 a night) was surrounded by a high chain link fence.
It was OK to be on the streets in daylight. The town was filled with piles of garbage. At one point a police car pulled up beside us while we at an outside cate. The officer in charge began beating a hapless prisoner on the head while simultaneously fondling him. Don't think this was that out of the ordinary. Pedestrians on the street could see and walked by quickly with fear and loathing on their faces.
Got curious enough - and hit the net. The train still runs although there are roads. There are tours down the tracks given how spectacular the ride it. It was - the tracks literally surrounded by jungle. Glad to see some tourist dollars are reaching that portion of the coast, though imagine it's still pretty poor. It was not at all typical of the rest of Ecuador (different population in the coastal marshes, isolated villages on the slopes, rough oil trade in the town).