Guayaquil then on to Vilcabamba

ihana.com - big trip - diary - ecuador - july 2003

Thursday 17 - Monday 21 July

Moving on from Montañitas we passed through the big town of Salinas for lunch, the beach, like all of the coastline, is deserted during the week. Arriving in Playas we were still unimpressed by the Ecuadorian coast but were persuaded to stay by a friendly local doris. With at least one half of our spirits renewed we headed on to Guayaquil.

Guayaquil is the biggest city in Ecuador and has a fair amount of traffic. This country has plenty of Series landies, lots of Minis and even an Allegro was spotted, moving under its own power too! We found a place to stay and set out to explore the city. In year 2000 the Malecon, a long promenade along the river bank, was completed and is an impressive thing. There are walkways, shops, museums and statues, all safe and with lots of very friendly girls around, a must see for any intrepid traveller. For some odd reason many people thought we were mormons even though we don't walk around in poorly fitting business suits with 'Elder Dillweed' written on our lapels, maybe they meant 'morons'?!

As seems to be our lot with Ecuador, we struggled to find decent nightlife, despite Guayaquil's reputation as a 7 days a week party town. We must have been to every place in town but nothing was as good as the Malecon during the day. We found some excellent seafood though, with shrimp farms all along the coast fresh 'camarones' aren't hard to find.

Intending to enter Peru well inland in order to get to Cajamarca we opted not to cross the coastal border and to head towards Loja (again) and the legendary Vilcabamba before crossing over in the middle of nowhere, ihana style.

Since the moment we entered Ecuador, the people have always asked us if we were heading for or have been to Vilcabamba. We asked why and they told us it was where all the gringos headed. Fine, a reason not to go then! However, it was directly on route for our border crossing at Zumba so we headed there anyway. We overnighted in the same hotel as before in Loja, a nice town if ever there was one, then continued on to Vilcabamba.

We were expecting a gringoy town like Baños but Vilcabamba was nothing of the sort, sure it had some gringoy restaurants but there were no tour companies to speak of and no internet - no gringos either. The climate of Vilcabamba is almost constantly 20 something degrees and its said that the locals live to 130 years old. We didn't find any particularly ancient specimens, the nearby mineral water factory has a picture of a 90-odd year old bloke on the label though. We chilled out, had some dinner, found a great place to camp then realised that there wasn't anything to do, never mind drink hallucinogenic cactus juice, and we needed to do some internet before getting ourselves in the middle of nowhere around the border. So off we went back to Loja, some 50kms away, did our internet and then came back to our camp spot, no worries. In the morning we woke to find donkeys already carrying loads of sugar cane over the wooden bridge which the landy just fitted under. Now for the border.

Join our Mailing List      Read Guest Book

all content is copyright © ihana.com 2003