Santiago to Mexico City... And back to Mexico City: Guayaquil

Now overnight buses are never fun, but the bus from Mancora through the border to Guayaquil was something else. We thought we were being smart by choosing the latest bus in order to arrive at a reasonable time in the morning, however, this meant that we had to get out of the bus at the Peru-Ecuador border at around 1am to go through immigration. Unfortunately, the Peruvian side appeared to be having some computer troubles and it took everyone about 3 hours to make it through the process. We'd finally all got back on the bus at 4am, settled in with eye masks and all, before anti-narcotics team decided they should get us all back off to search through the bus. The bus passed and we finally made it back on to make our way to Guayaquil.

Not a great start to our Ecuadorian explorations, which was further dampened by Paul coming down with some sort of bug (too much ceviche?) and me feeling like a zombie with lack of sleep. Luckily we could check into our room straight away and we spent the day lying on the bed in front of the fan. Guayaquil is HOT!

Day two we'd recovered and headed off to explore the city. Guayaquil has an amazing park, a lot like the cat park in Lima, but instead of cats there were iguanas! Within this small park in the city, there are over a hundred iguanas that just chill out and put up with the poking and prodding from curious locals, kids and tourists. It was pretty amazing being able to get so close to these prehistoric animals. They felt very strange to touch! The park was also filled with an amazing number of turtles.

We learnt a good lesson in Guayaquil - do not venture out between 2pm and 4pm, AKA siesta time. We walked across the city to explore the suburb of Santa Ana, a beautiful barrio filled with colourful houses and tropical plants. However, it was extremely hot and everything was closed so we could find no shelter from the heat in the area. So we jumped in a taxi and found some shelter in a KFC back in the centre.

Once it had cooled down we slowly headed back to the hostel through the city. We did some people watching in the main plaza, watched some people get arrested (along with about 200 other local rubberneckers), and experienced the streets coming alive with street-side BBQs and other vendors.

We made it through another hot night with no external windows and only a fan and headed off to the bus terminal the next day to move on to Baños.