Saturday morning, I headed to Guayaquil with Rebecca, a girlfriend I met from school. Her boyfriend was flying into Guayaquil and I decided to go to the coast, which meant I needed to go through it anyway, so it worked out perfect. Normally, I wouldn't have planned much time in Guayaquil, as it's muy peligrosio (very dangerous). Even taking taxis isn't safe, because many of them will just drive you to their friends, so that they can take all your shit. Plus, from what I've heard, it just isn't really a city that has that much too offer. Well, the reports about what the city has to offer were wrong, but the taxi warnings are true (according to the locals -- not first hand, thank goodness).
Luckily, a few of us
had met a friend from Guayaquil a few weeks earlier in Cuenca, via our
schoolmate Kendra. My new Guayaquil
friend, Xavier Enrique is awesome. We've
been friends since the moment we met. He
knows just enough english to help me and is great to talk to. I've helped him with his english a bit and
he's helped me a ton with my spanish.
We're both really patient with teaching, so we have fun talking and
practicing the languages. :)
Xavier met us at the
train station and helped us find a great hostel that wasn't in the guide
book. Word of advice, if you're ever in
Guayaquil and have a choice between a room with or without air conditioning…
spring for the air conditioning. At
first, we were like… ah, who cares, we don't need it. But the rooms were SO astronomically hot and
humid, that you break out into a full body sweat within about 5 seconds of
opening the door, with no window, so know possibility of cooling it down
any. After coming back in the evening
and having the rooms be just as bad, even though it was nice and "cool"
(I'm guessing a cool 70 degrees by our hostel (far enough from the river to not
get allot of breeze), but with no sun at night, of course, so it didn't feel
quite that warm really) outside -- we gave up and got air conditioned rooms. It was like heaven in comparison. The location of the place was great, we were
just outside of the center and could easily walk around to all of the different
interesting sights.
Xavier gave us the
grand city tour, which was really great.
We started with empenadas that were F'ing amazing, then wandered over to
el parque de centro to see all the iguanas that live in the park. The park was beautiful and the iguanas were
totally docile and petable, it was great.
Still grasping spanish a bit though, when we were figuring out the plan,
at first I thought that we were going to go eat iguanas, but quickly (or not
so...) figured out were going to go eat and then see the iguanas (whew).
:)
After many iguana
pictures, we walked to the shore, passing a few beautiful buildings, including
a beautiful municipal building with statues and palm trees in front. We got to the river and walked up some
massive steps to get to the top, the steps were almost as tall as my legs, it
was pretty funny walking up them. At the
top, you could see really far up and down the river. A few boats went by that were there for
transit or tour, but no others under motor.
We saw a couple fisherman with nets and a row boat, no poles. It was a really great view. I wonder how deep the water is, because the
water was really muddy -- clean, but muddy -- from the muddy river bottom and
there were allot of floating branches all over the river.
We continued on down
the walkway and checked out the scenery.
The area was really beautiful.
You could see the residential area called Pena in the distance, which
was absolutely gorgeous from there.
Every house was painted in one of 5 or so almost pastel type
colors. It looked pretty amazing from a
far. We walked through a garden area
that was really beautiful, huge trees with the roots hitting the ground You could tell the tree was possibly
[relatively] young, because none of the draping roots from the tree were very
beefy (at least that's my uneducated guess, assuming it's even that type of
tree).
We continued along
the river , just enjoying the beauty in
the middle of the city. Near the end of
the walk, they had a huge fiesta for charity with dancers and music and such,
which was pretty cool to watch for a few minutes.
We waited for our
friend Nick, who was flying through Guayaquil and hangin' with us for the day
on his way to Peru. Then we headed to
this area close by that was super cute.
It was a seemingly never ending set of stairs, winding up the hill,
lined with tiendas and bars and snacks and other stuff. Each of the buildings had a picture outside
of it of what the building looked like before it was renovated. It's pretty amazingly different. Apparently, the entire waterfront area and
that stairs area lined with bars and such were all fairly new. The president had the entire thing redone to
bring some beauty to the city and attract tourism, etc. I can't imagine what the city must have been
like before that, but as sketchy as the city is in general, It was a great call
to fix that all up and provide one safe place where people can go and have fun
at night. From what I understand,
literally everywhere else in the city is unsafe at night unless you personally
know the people. We sat and had a beer
overlooking the river, with a sweltering hot, yet cooler than before
breeze. What a great day.
For dinner, we went
back to the river, t o this area where they have a handful of different
restaurants you can order at and sit at one of the tables by the river. The food was great and the location was
unbeatable. On the way there, we walked
by this park area where the kids could get into these huge plastic bubbles and
walk on the water in them. I REALLY
REALLY wanted to see if they would let me do it, but we didn't have time. We had about an hour for dinner and then Nick
had to head to the bus terminal and we had to go to the airport to pick up
Rebecca's boyfriend.
The airport pick up
did NOT go as planned when we got there, we were told the wrong terminal for
Kevin's flight and the flight that we thought it was, was delayed an hour and a
half, so we sat in the airport for two hours, to learn that we had the wrong spot
and had totally missed him. We finally
caught up with him at the first hostel we tried to stay at, but decided not
to. By the time we got everything
figured out and got him to the correct place, it was about 1:30am, so we got a
really late start to the night. :( But it was still fun…
We headed back to
the bars on the stairs and after the 3rd one, finally found a place with both
space and a cold beer - whew… things were looking up. The bars quickly closed, around 2:30, so we
headed to a kareoke bar in the building below where Xavier lives, where he knew
the owners, so we could hang out with people there for awhile. It was fun, we listened to bad kareoke,
danced, met new people, and had a great time.
:) After the bar, we hung out at
Xavier's waiting for the seguro (safe) cab his mom had called for us. (It's very normal here, the whole family
lives together for a very long time.
Even possibly after getting married.)
It's a pretty crazy concept, but it's not safe in Guayaquil to hail a
taxi after the bars at night, unless you're in the one safe place I was talking
about (even then, there's a chance it's not safe.) The taxi that Xavier's mom called was
somebody that they knew and he walked down to ensure it was really him. Knowing somebody in the city made a huge
difference and made our experience in Guayaquil SO much better. He knew how to keep us safe, while still
allowing us to be able to go out late and have fun. We got back to the hostel and crawled into
bed around 4:30am.
The next morning, we
had a couple hours in the city, so grabbed empenadas (awesome!) for
"breakfast" and repeated some of the previous days tour for
Kevin. Such a great experience in
Guayaquil. We headed to the bus terminal
at 1pm and I said goodbye to Kevin and Rebecca, who headed back to Cuenca. :( I
hopped on a bus to Montanita with Xavier, who decided to come with me.
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