Day 17 - Guayaquil

Passing through JippiJappa was nuts. You realise you're in a whole other world. Its poor. The buildings are falling down, the people are sitting in the street with nothing to do. Th place is a mess. BUT, its beautiful in its simplicity. The people look happy, and are friendly. Everyone goes out of their way to help you onto the right bus, down the right street, to the best places. Ecuador as a whole is full of really nice people - people who seem genuinely happy with what they have. I guess that shouldn't be so surprising, but its hard to imagine *me* ever being happy in such a quiet place.

Anyway, passing through the bus station, we arrived 4 hours later in Guayaquil. The sprawling bus station seems the size of gatwick airport, and there are people everywhere. Some old dude shouted at me ("GET out the way MR PIGHEAD"). Checked into a crappy hotel and headed out to the recently redeveloped Malecon, the seafront port area.



Guayaquil is rotten. Slummy, dirty, intimidating, dangerous. Its not recommended by the guide books, and not often by travellers. But we had a day to kill. Realizing nobody wanted to go there, the council spend millions building a weird kids theme-park thing along the river front, with tonnes of security guards and a real nice feel to it. Sam and I spend the day wandering up and down the Malecon, checking out the contemporary arts museum, posting a postcard to my mum, waiting on 3 ocassions for the town's tour bus (which didn't run for us because there was too few people), and sitting under fan spraying cold mist to keep us cool from the scorching heat.



Photos from the contemporary arts museum...







By the evening, we were pretty bored of the Malecon, and the city is kinda dangerous to wander around, so we got a cab to the Imax cinema, and watched a wicked documentary about extreme sports on the MASSIVE screen. It was mindblowing. Then we played some more cards (cards cards cards all the time) and jumped on a midnight nightbus to Quito.