Guayaquil, Ecuador

So I'm pretty much a mountain dweller these days. Life in the Andes is good but the altitude and the cold weather do get a bit tiresome. After a month in Cuenca we've come out to check out the coast of Ecuador...and so far we've experienced a couple of rude shocks.

1. The accent...actually it's not the accent. These humans speak three times as fast as my Andino friends and their language is barely recognisable as Spanish!

2. The men....look like they've never seen a woman before. I've racked up over 50 countries now and I've never been looked at like that. We were looked up and down, followed by two men in a car and then some crazy guy exposed his penis to us which was a first for me (not the penis obviously).

Anyway, that aside it's warm now! And there's plenty of seafood to eat :)

Since we felt fairly unsafe and it's ridiculously (and unecessarily) expensive in Guayaquil we decided just to stay a couple of days. We still managed to take in the main sites of Las Peñas...

The boardwalk along the river (Malecon 2000). 

And last but not least the main plaza in Guayaquil which is full of Iguanas and irritating children (not pictured). 

Oh and the other interesting thing going on here was parking. Basically you park your car and leave the hand brake off. Some guy is in charge of moving all the cars as required. I'm still not sure how this is efficient and we witnessed him crash three cars together, but it was quite amusing to watch whilst enjoying breakfast a few floors above.