Guayaquil
ECUADOR
Gateway to the Galapagos
By LYNDI
Friday, September 26, 2008
This will probably be the quickest post yet.
Neither Aaron nor I wanted to visit Guayaquil – it’s just a big, bustling city with lots of traffic. But it’s also the gateway to the Galapagos, so we made a brief stopover.
We arrived in the late afternoon from Baños and found a hotel room at Hotel Velez near Parque Centenario. Since it was Sunday night, we walked around for quite awhile searching for an open place to eat. We finally settled on a “soda shoppe”, which I always thought was milkshakes and burgers. This, however, was fried chicken and fries. I was able to find a fruit shake – and only later saw that the fruit they used in the shakes had a bunch of little flies on it. Sick.
We spent the majority of the next day trying to find cheap tickets to the Galapagos. We finally went to Galasam Travel and they offered us $10 off whatever TAME airlines was offering us. So we went across the street to TAME and they said it was $322 roundtrip, which the agent wrote on a piece of paper. Realizing that this was nothing printed and official, we got her to write what the roundtrip cost for a student would be “if we could find our student ID card” and it was only $312. So we went back to Galasam and told them they offered us the student rate, and Galasam promptly offered us tickets for about $300. So I guess that’s the best way to scam a travel agency that’s trying to scam their rivals.
With our Galapagos flight in order, we spent the rest of the afternoon walking along Guayaquil’s Malecon 2000 which is actually a really nice esplanade along the riverside filled with parks and gardens. We also visited the enormous black market known as Bahia to see if we could find any camping supplies in case we were able to camp on the Galapagos, and spent some time walking around the sprawling city.
There really wasn’t much to Guayaquil for us – in fact I didn’t even take any pictures so the ones here are all from Google images. It was a long night, however, because I was so excited about leaving for the Galapagos that I couldn’t sleep half the night. But come the morning of the 30th, we were off for the experience of a lifetime.
