Ecuador - Cuenca and Guayaquil

27th March 2010

After an 8 hour bus ride I turned up in Cuenca in the evening and went to El Cafecito, a great little hostel/restaurant/bar, as recommended by the lovely Susie. Met tons of nice new people and we all went out to an amazing resturant that cooked up fantastic hot plates of meat (I had pasta!) with hundreds of side dishes which was pretty cool.

The following day was Palm Sunday so I met up with Rob (who I'd met in Cuenca) and Abi and Hannah again for a wee stroll around town to see all the festivities (which mainly comprised the churches being packed out of the doors and lots of people walking around with foliage). Had a nice wee stroll round the outside of the museum (it was closed) and back along a really pretty river running through town and followed it up with the usual evening entertainment of eating and drinking.

The next day Rob and I went for brekkie and then got the bus 2 1/2 hours back towards Banos to go to some pretty amazing Canari/Inca ruins called Ingapirca. Not quite the scale of Machu Picchu or anything, but a pretty big site all the same and really interesting - it's a fusion of local Canari moon worship and Inca sun worship, all laid out in the shape of a jaguar. The countryside in the mountains is really beautiful - really green and lush with lots of farmland and picturesque mountain landscapes.

I pretty much just hung out with my new friends for the rest of the week, visiting the viewpoint, going to the museum (cool shrunken heads!), eating a lot, fighting about the use of the term "America/American" to mean the US rather than the continent etc. Also managed to be the victim of an attempted mugging, in broad daylight, along with my friend Kathleen. Four guys approached us and tried to grab my bag from my shoulder, but I shouted, screamed, held on etc and they gave up and walked off. Noone nearby (there was a car full of locals and a family standing nearby) came to our aid. Kind of threw me off my stride for a few days but I didn't lose anything and wasn't injured so it wasn't that bad. There were a few other people at our hostel who were also the victim of attempted muggings, but in each case the muggers got nothing so they should probably look for a new line of work....

I didn't manage to formulate a plan to leave before the Easter festivities, and travel would have been a bit troublesome whilst it was going on, so I stayed for Easter. Learnt lots of specifics such as time of death etc from locals which was kind of interesting, and saw a big parade going by, complete with floats depicting the series of events (not quite sure why Jesus was chained to a chicken in one of them!) and everyone in mourning as they walked by. Was kind of interesting. On Good Friday the hostel was serving special soup with 12 kinds of beans and jesus represented by 1/4 of a boiled egg. My religious knowledge increases in leaps and bounds......

Us foreigners, having no access to Cadbury's on such a high holiday, settled for hot chocolate with a dash of rum, and huge slabs of chocolate cake on Easter Sunday.

After Easter Kathleen (my attempted mugging buddy) and I headed off on a bus, through the really beautiful Cajas national park, on roads that were being freshly concreted (and therefore one way with tons of delays) down the hills and onto the flat, hot, humid plains towards the coast and the big city of Guayaquil. Kathleen went off couch surfing and I got a completely mental taxi driver (muttering under his breath that I couldn't speak Spanish when all I didn't understand was ONE VERB in the entire conversation we had about the weather, where I was going, where I was from etc!) off to a hostel.

The next day started off oppressively hot and humid and sweaty, but my new friend Mike and I braved the local bus to get into town and go to a little city park which had the added bonus of massive iguanas running free and a lake full of turtles and then off to the Malecon which is a boardwalk alongside a massive brown, slow moving river. We had heard tales of Guayaquil being massively renovated and a shiny example of modern city living and suchlike, but in reality it was just a bit dull, with a strip mall and food stalls serving friend food. Would not like to have seen the place before it was spruced up! There was a good culture and contemporary arts museum at one end though which had lots of interesting stuff and was airconditioned. We ended the day, together with an American called Paul, at one of the seafood stands near the hostel, bashing open crabs with a mallet and sucking out all the flesh. I only ended up with minor injuries so judged the experience a success!

And then to the fun stuff: I decided, a little bit on a whim, and probably having a lot to do with the fact that my hostel was also a travel agency, to go to the Galapagos. In one day I managed to sort out my boat trip and accompanying flights, leaving the next day (no reason to hang around in Guayaquil), acquire all the cash to pay for it and get to the mall to buy an underwater camera.