Full Disclosure!
When we first planned this whole trip in the summer of last year in front of our cosy log burner in cosy Dumfries, one of our dreams was to visit The Galapagos Archipelago, or really just - The Galapagos. We knew exactly where this wonderful archipelago was - in the Pacific Ocean, about 1000 km from the coast of South America. Although what we didn’t know until we researched it is that they are a part of Ecuador. So like it or not we were going to Ecuador, so we set out to find out about Ecuador.
Our friends Google and the Home Office didn’t seem to have a lot that was good to say about our new destination. Stories about the Columbian drug gangs moving in and high levels of organised crime, kidnappings…well, you get the gist. We had fallen in love with the idea of the Galapagos, even if our new research had me calling it the ‘Gulag Archipelago’. We thought that surely the islands weren’t in the hands of the drug cartels. So we booked our flights anyway and arranged one night in Guayaquil, the biggest city in Ecuador and a major port. The only city directly connecting the islands to the mainland.
Guayaquil had figured prominently in the bad news stories along with areas around the northern border with Columbia. We booked another single night in Guayaquil at the end too, but that was as far as we got. We couldn’t find a flight out of Guayaquil that didn’t involve going back to Peru, so we just left it for sometime in the future. As it turned out it was a good thing that we had since it allowed us to make our new plans for Costa Rica when they came along.
Guayaquil was a shock to us.
We met the friendliest people we had met anywhere in South America. Indeed Ricardo at the Ibis Hotel is the friendliest person we have ever met at an Accor Hotel anywhere in the world and we’ve been in a few. Our thanks to Ricardo for that warm welcome on both occasions.
The airport was well organised, taxi drivers were among the best anywhere and most of the people we came across spoke good English. What had we done? This is the only time on this whole trip we spent only one night in a city we had to pass through. We spent a week in Santiago and the same in Lima. Now I realise that we should probably have spent at least another week or even two exploring Ecuador, instead of being frightened off by all the scaremongering.
As much as we loved our trip to The Galapagos, we can’t help feeling that we missed a chance to see the rest of what looks like the wonderful country of Ecuador.
