Guayaquil

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Guayaquil, with 2.4 million inhabitants Ecuador´s largest city, was always on my backburner of things to see in Ecuador. I imagined it largely as an industrial city with little interest to me. Overall, my visit to this Perla del Pacifico confirmed this impression. However, I found a number of interesting places that are well worth visiting:

1) The Malecon

The restoration of this 2,5 km long boardwalk along the river Guayas has been completed only a few years ago and offers to the visitors a number of restaurants, museums, tropical gardens and historical monuments and is a really nice place to stroll along. One can also just sit on on of the benches and contemplate all the big and small hussocks floating by. To me they seemed like an image of all the people that have been floating by me over the past months and years, that I got to know and like, have spent time with and that I had to let go and move on with their lifes. It has been sad sometimes to realize that friends are moving on and that we just had a short time together, but the river that it is natural that everything flows and moves on and maybe one should just enjoy those tussocks as they are in front of one's eyes and then let them go and look at what else comes along.

2) Las Peñas

Las Peñas is Guayaquil's oldest neighbourhood, located on the slopes of the hill Santa Ana. Also this area has been beautifully restored over the past few years. Most of the houses are around 100 years old and each has its own history. Famous personalities of politics and culture have lived here: the musician Antonio Neumane, the presidents Francisco Robles, José Luis Tamayo, Carlos Julio Arosemena Tola, Alfredo Baquerizo Moreno, Eloy Alfaro, the writer Enrique Gil Gilbert, the painter Manuel Rendón Seminario and even Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Today there are art galleries, cafés and restaurants, all lovingly restored and crowned by a lighthouse and a chapel on top of the hill.

2)The cemetary

This is the one of most amazing cemetaries I have ever seen. And I have seen quite a few over the years of travelling, including the ones in big places like Sydney, Manila, Medellin and small, but interesting ones like in Salzburg or in the Luberon. There must be hundreds of thousands of dead buried here. The guards just answered upon my question that there are 'muuuchos'. There are huge family graveyards and mausoleums, graves high up into the hills and huge halls with one grave next to the other in the walls. It is all in white and with huge palm trees and tropical flowers and tees in-between.

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