Tuesday at 3PM we boarded another Crus de Sur bus, heading out of Lima toward Tumbes, the border town between Peru and Ecuador. Roughly 26 hours later we arrived in Tumbes, Peru, collected our bags, used the bathroom, went four blocks down to the Sifa Bus Terminal, and immediately hopped on a six-hour bus to Guayaquil, Ecuador.
The bus to Guayaquil stopped at the border for us to officially exit Peru and told us that they would wait for us and the other couple of passengers. We walked into the office, and nothing was happening. People were standing around looking a little confused, and no one was at the processing desk. After several minutes of awkwardly standing around, we asked someone what was up and were confused by his answer. Eventually we figured out that the power was out and that it must have gone out just before we arrived. After some time, we were shuffled into a line entering a different room to be processed by computer and then sent to the first room we had been in to get stamped. So it all worked out, and our bus was waiting for us as promised.
We stopped again on the other side of the border to pick up more passengers. We drove for quite a while, and we were starting to wonder if we would stop for customs on the Ecuador side at all. Just when I was about to put my passport away because it seemed ridiculously far from the border, we stopped for customs. Then a while down the road we stopped for a security check. Then a few minutes later we stopped a a narcotics checkpoint. Don't ask me to explain it, because I can't. Then we were on the road for several hours with one rest stop about half way through. We arrived at the Guayquil bus terminal, which is HUGE, took a taxi to a hostel listed in The Book, dropped our stuff off, ate a great & insanely cheap meal around the corner, and crashed for the night.
We decided to spend an extra night in Guayquil, since it looked like there were some interesting things to do, it would break up our bus marathon, and we didn't need to be to our volunteer site until the weekend. We visited a park where giant iguanas roam around freely and then made our way to the river.
There's a huge and relatively new boardwalk called the Malecon 2000 along the river. We walked up most of that, weaving through a botanical garden, and visiting the Museum of Anthropology and Art. At the far end is a hill called the Colina Santa Ana, a 444-step stairway lined with cafes and pubs leads up to a lighthouse and chapel at the top of the hill. We learned the hard way that the cafes are open for dinner not lunch, or at least not at 3PM. We stopped at a pub for a beer and a barsnack comprised of banana chips and chunks of cheese, which was surprisingly tasty, and then continued to the top of the lighthouse for some pictures. We walked back down the Malecon, had some icecream cones and people watched for a bit.
Afterward, we headed back toward our hostel and ate dinner at the same restaurant. I had tried Eric's shrimp dish the night before, and decided to go out on a limb and order it for myself. (For those who don't know, I DO NOT eat seafood of any sort, so this was a big step.) We woke up not quite as early as we planned Friday morning, got breakfast at the same place, and headed to the bus terminal to start our whirling about again. We booked a 6-hour bus to Ambato, the town next to Salasaka where we would be volunteering, and departed within the hour. Our bus raced crazily through winding mountain roads, as seems to be the custom.
It was raining in Ambato when we arrived and we hadn't printed out the direction to our site in Salasaka yet, so we decided to just find a hostel there for the night so we could find our way in the morning. The Book lists two hostels for all of Ambato (it isn't a tourist town), one mid-range option and one budget option. The budget option said it was clean and centrally located, so we opted for that. Centrally located, yes. Clean, a subjective statement. It seemed to be the sort of place young men crashed at when they party in Ambato for the weekend. We got a room to ourselves, used an internet cafe downstairs, found some food on the block, played cards in our room, and slept in our clothes on top of the covers. It could have been a lot worse, but I would have chosen a lot better had I know what we were getting into. All part of the adventure though.
We got up early and headed straight out. Since we had big bags, didn't know how buses worked, and just wanted to get there, we took a cab for $6 to Salasaka and were dropped off in the "center," which just seems to be some arbitrary point along the main road. Fortunately, some other volunteers who were heading out for a weekend trip were also on the main road and called us over. They gave us directions to the library, where we ran into another brand new volunteer and met Roberto, the director of SKY. Mattias, the other volunteer, showed us to the hostel, and Roberto gave the three of us a tour a little later in the morning and treated us to lunch. There are about 14 other volunteers, so we started to get to know those who had stuck around for the weekend.
I'll write more about our volunteering once things get rolling. We'll probably be working on some sort of construction project since we're only here for 2 weeks. Today, we need to head to the market in Ambato for some food and then get some laundry done. But, for now, the whirlwind is done and we're settling into our new home in Salasaka.
Happy Thanksgiving to all!
Meghan & Eric
