Day Sixteen - Guayaquil

Today was our first full day in Guayaquil. We had a lazy morning around the hostel, and then headed out for some breakfast. We were walking for around 10 minutes before Brendan realised we were going in the complete wrong direction!!

It was very warm and muggy, so we headed down to the waterfront and the infamous 'Malecon 2000' which is supposedly guayaquil's multimillion pound new waterfront development. We were here on a Tuesday and it was pretty dead. We walked past children's parks and mini theme park rides, as well as a few restaurants and cafes. We walked all the way up towards the iMax cinema and the museum, where we could see all the multicoloured houses on the hill which were really pretty. We were going to walk up to the view point but we were both very hot and hungry.

We found a place called 'Sweet and Coffee' which is advertised as Ecuador's equivalent of Starbucks. It was actually pretty good, we had quiche and milkshakes! It was super cool in here as well so we lingered for a while!

We then continued down the waterfront in the opposite direction, which was a lot prettier. There was a large sailing boat docked (permanently I think) as well as some bars and statues/monuments. The sun came out at this point for us which was also nice!

We then headed in towards the centre, to go and check out the San Francisco XXXX. To be quite honest, it was very unimpressive, hidden behind a few other buildings with no real frontage or outside area at the main entrance. We decided to head on to the iguana park. This was really cool, there were literally dozens of iguanas all chilling out in this park, ranging from tiny to a good couple of foot in length! We saw two lying on top of each other, however Brendan told me off for taking a photo of this as 'I should give hem some privacy'!!!

We went to a supermarket to buy some rubbish snacks for our journey tomorrow and then back to the hostel to change and chill out before dinner.

We went to a really nice place round the corner called La Canoa. It was typical Ecuadorean food, I had some kind of seafood curry rice thing and Brendan had his favourite, a slightly different take on Lomo Saltado. I finally had the gin and tonic I'd been craving for weeks, and it definitely lived up to it!!

We went back to the hostel via the main park all lot up which was really nice, to pack up our stuff ready for another long bus ride to Cuenca in the morning.