. We got a map of the surrounding area from the hostel front desk and headed out to the malecon (boardwalk). We spent some time at the malecon, then headed to the main street called 9 de Octubre for dinner. It was Sunday and a lot of shops were closed. We had dinner at Pizza Hut and headed back to the hostel for the night.
The next morning we had breakfast at
Sweet and Coffee, a chain in Guayaquil, and went back to the hostel to plan the rest of the day. There was a vegetarian restaurant
Krishna Express just two blocks away so we went there for lunch. After lunch we walked to
Parque Simon Bolivar. It is a small park surrounded by busy roads. As we were entering the park we saw a bunch of people staring at something on the ground - a land iguana. We couldn't see anymore iguanas from that spot but as soon as we walked into the park a little more we saw a lot more. There must have been more than 50 iguanas at that park. Several iguanas had climbed up on trees but a lot of them were roaming around the park freely with the people. One of the park visitors started feeding bananas to the iguanas and got a lot of the iguanas gathered together. Some of the iguanas even climbed up on her! We spent some time there taking pictures of the iguanas and then walked to the Malecon 2000 shopping mall.
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| Iguanas at Parque Simon Bolivar |
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| Iguana up on a tree |
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| Poonam petting an iguana |
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| The iguanas wanted more bananas! |
The
Malecon 2000 mall was right on the boardwalk. It's a series of air-conditioned buildings with small shops (mostly clothing and some electronics) inside. We were looking for binoculars but could not find any. We weren't even sure if people understood us when we said binoculars. One of the shopkeepers told us to try at a different shopping mall called Policentro which was in the north side of the city. With no success on the binoculars, the only shopping we did there was sunglasses for Poonam.
From there we went looking for another mall called
Mercado Sur hoping to find binoculars there. But instead we stumbled across an area of street shops called
La Bahia. This place was quite spread out. There was an entire section with more than 50 shops and they were all selling footwear only! There was also an entire section dedicated towards shops selling and repairing electronics (cellphones, cameras, etc) but we had no luck finding binoculars there either.
We went back to the boardwalk and walked along it for a while before heading back to the hostel for the night.
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| Not sure what she thinks she won... |
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| View from malecon at night |
One of the shopkeepers told us about the Policentro mall and we also found out about a bigger Mall del Sol and they were both in the same area. So we decided to go there the next day and see if we could find binoculars.
First stop was
Policentro mall. There were a couple of sports goods and electornics shops. Initially we were having trouble explaining "binoculars" to them but then we figured out that they pronounced it bee-no-coo-la-res and then at least they understood what we wanted. We had no luck finding a binocular here as well. Each shop pointed us towards a different one in the mall and after we went full circle we decided to leave and try our luck at Mall del Sol.
Mall del Sol was a short taxi ride away from Policentro. This was a much bigger mall with its own food court. We went through several shops here as well and the only binocular we found was a cheap one (price and quality) at a telemarketing shop so we did not buy that. We roamed around that mall, did some grocery for our Galapagos trip at Megamaxi, ate some pizza at Pizza Hut. Ashutosh also had a donut at Dunkin Donuts for $1.25. We went back to hostel, had fruits for dinner and slept.
Guayaquil is said to be one of the dangerous cities in Ecuador. Though we did see police everywhere and shop keepers behind iron grills, we did not feel unsafe. It seems the south side of the city is unsafe compared to the north side.
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