Guayaquil,
Ecuador
Tuesday, November 7, 2006
Alex: Well after the missed flight debacle we finally made it to Guayaquil. This is the biggest city in Ecuador and generally not very highly rated by travellers but it is the commercial centre, which suited us as we needed to replace our camera and find a guidebook. We got in, left our bags in left luggage at the airport and went to the biggest mall to, unsuccessfully, do our shopping. It was odd after the Galapagos to be somewhere that commercial, we could have been anywhere in the world really. When we made it to our hotel and the centre of Guayaquil we realise we weren't going to have too many problems finding a camera, literally every other shop was an electronics store, what we didn't realise is not many places stock Fuji, Sony being the electronics brand of choice it seems. We only really planned to have two days in Guayaquil one shopping and one just chilling out a bit and seeing the city (the Galapagos had been so stressful after all!). We bought our camera, still couldn't find a guidebook, but it took all day as we obviously had to go into every single one of the millions of electronics stores before going back to the first one we went to! The second day just wandered up the Malacón (the promenade in front of the river) to Las Peñas a quaint, renovated area at the top of the Malacón. It was quite refreshing, the area has all been renovated but not for tourists benefit, in fact we didn't see any other gringos the whole time we were there, so the area is full of local people enjoying themselves. We got up on our 3rd day and got to the bus station a full 2 hours before our guide book had said the bus to Trujillo in Peru left and..had missed it by half an hour! Bought our ticket for the next day and went back to town, back to the hotel and spent the rest of our day catching up on emails and going to the cinema (most films are in English with Spanish subtitles) to see United 93 about the final flight on 11 Septmember, good but quite stressful and made me sob my heart out, not a film to watch if you just want to chill out or have a pending flight!
Sucessfully made the bus the following day. A bit surprising as we had gone for a quiet drink the night before and had been invited to join a group of locals and got fairly tipsy. It was quite amusing, they didn't speak English, our Spanish still isn't great so we communicated mostly with sign language (most of it rude), the only dampener was when they tried to rip us off when it came to paying!
Guayaquil doesn't have a good reputation among travellers, and there aren't many tourist attractions but we quite enjoyed it, we got to do our shopping and see and appreciate a bit of non-gringofied Ecuador.
