Guayaquil and day trip to Alausí

We stayed in a beautiful little apartment with a small kitchen in Guayaquil. Our hosts are incredibly helpful and accommodating! Our host Manolo personally drives us everywhere in the city and has helped us with translation when booking trips.

On the first day in Guayaquil, we walked along the Malecón 2000, a wide waterfront promenade along the Río Guayas, and then climbed the adjacent hilltop Cerro Santa Ana with its colorful, nested houses.

Yesterday, we took an adventurous day trip: at 6:15 am, we took a bus past exotic vegetation and impressive mountains and rock formations, farm huts, and grazing livestock to the peaceful mountain village of Alausí in the Andes. There, we boarded a nostalgic panoramic train that traveled along the spectacular railway route of the Nariz del Diablo (Devil's Nose), a 100-meter-high prominent rock outcrop above the gorge of the Rio Chanchán, and back again.

Since there was no transportation back to Guayaquil from Alausí at that time, we had to take a bus to a town about 2 hours away, from where there were still buses to Guayaquil. The ride to this town was hair-raising: even though it was already getting dark and there is hardly any lighting on the mountain roads, people there drive at least 130 km/h when facing oncoming traffic. Animals and people standing on the road simply get honked at. The beautiful mountain panorama at sunset at least distracted us a bit.

We spent the four-hour journey to Guayaquil in a slightly more comfortable bus, mostly sleeping/dozing. We arrived at our hotel a little later than midnight and immediately fell into bed, completely exhausted.