Welcome to bus travel

The first leg was mild - eight hours down through Ecuador to Guayaquil - a huge, industrial port city, and by all accounts a place to be missed. Excellent. Luckily I am blessed with an almost irresistable ability to sleep on buses, so the day passed in a daze of snatched views out of the window, Spanish films, English films (it´s fascinating to see how much they tone down the language when they write the subtitles) and reading, in between long periods of dreaming.

I had a hostel recommendation, so upon arriving I wasted no time getting to the relative comfort and security of my dorm room and rangthe bus company to try and reserve a ticket to Lima (Peru) for the morrow. Unfortunately Iwas too late, and they were all gone. Apparently every one else was also trying to get out of thisdamn place.

The next morning I headed straight to the bus station and, after a bit of a panic and a row when she told me there were no seats for Monday either (when i had been assured the night before that there were some) I managed toreserve a seat and spent the rest of the day drifitng around the new waterfront development, which is generally accepted to be Guayaquil´s main redeeming feature.

In fact it really wasn´t so bad and the development, ´The Malecon´, is fine - very bland and faceless, full of ice cream and food vendors, families and undefined modern sculpture in the ´poles, wires and sails style´ - rather like strolling down Embankment on a touristy Saturday in the summer - but very clean and jolly. At the far end of the Malecon is a district called Las Penas where cute narrow cobbled streets wind their way up a hill between brightly painted and elegantly aged colonial wooden mansions. One route up the hill is a tourist highway, but more by luck than design I managed to find an alternative route up and spent a blissful couple of hours (despite the sweltering heat) strolling up the hill between people´s back yards and gardens, catching occasional glimpses of the huge view and being greeted amiably by everyone I met. The top of the hill affords the best views over the city which the smog permits, and, thankfully there is a sweet little church where I retreated, with my best devout face on, to get out of the sun for a bit and catch my breath.

I passed the evening in some more drifting and sat by the water until 10ish, reading my guidebook and reflecting that all in all it had been a rather nice day.

written by  Alex Kent on November 10, 2007 from Guayaquil, Ecuador
from the travel blog: On the Varieties of Nature
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