Our bus reached Guayaquil terminal around 5 PM and we took a taxi to Hostel Suites Madrid. 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 |
