Acacia

Breakfast was a disappointing 2 slices of white bread, soft cheese, jam, fresh oj and hot chocolate or instant coffee - to Anna's disgust...the reception man said something about ringing us earlier for coffee so maybe there was fresh coffee at some point but we didn't have a phone call?!

Guayaquil is not supposed to be very nice or with much worth seeing so we had hoped to get in and out as quickly as possible but after spending a short time here we totally disagree.

Whilst last night was pretty much deserted and the walk to the malecon involved a dodgy walk through a virtually deserted market, today was heaving with people and cars.

First stop (after finding truffle magnums!) was the iguana park, a small park in the middle of the city full of hundreds of iguanas that are fed daily. There is also a pond full of fish and tortoises, plus another pit full of hundreds of tortoises piled on top of each other. There were iguanas everywhere including over 50 up one tree - whilst trying to count them I looked down and said there's a lot of poop on the floor here and moved back a step, just as one of them sprayed us from above...lucky escape!

We wandered up the main street (9 Octobre) away from the river and got Anna some proper coffee and me a dunkin donut. We visited a few travel agencies looking for our Galapagos tour but they were only selling land tours and spoke little English, so we looked in the LP and it was actually of some use. We ended up at Hostal Suites Madrid, a hostel which also does tours and after 2 hours and 2 trips to the cashpoint we were all sorted. Unfortunately it's high season so there wasn't a ton of last minute deals available but we are lucky that we have a few weeks to play with as we have a few stops to make but need to come back this way before heading to Quito. We got some flights, a 5 day cruise with 50% off and extra days on the islands either side for a small fortune!! An added bonus is that the flight back takes is to Quito so we don't need to do another long bus trip through the mountains. Luckily we could pay for most of it by credit card with no extra charges which is unusual here.

Then we continued down the road, stopping at Ali Baba (another LP recommendation) for some lovely falafel wraps for dinner ($10).

Afterwards we continued on the street until we reached the Estero Salado malecon, a much smaller boardwalk which had an unexpected beautiful coloured water fountain display from a barge, set to classical music. We also walked along a beautifully lit path by the river.

On the way back we stopped for frozen yogurt - Anna had a huge one with fruit, I had a much smaller one with chocolate toppings ($3.50) and got a cab back to the hotel ($3).

We both love Guayaquil...plenty of food choices, very clean, very modern, tons of statues and nice buildings, the people walk at almost normal speed (though do stare at us a fair bit - the older men seem to love trying to chat to us!) and don't understand why it's so overlooked.Read more