Day 409 – San Cristobal to Guayaquil
Back to mainland Ecuador
San Cristobal Island
When we woke up, we realised that we had left the room’s door unlocked and worse, the key was in the door. As far as we could tell, no one came inside. Ooops. We checked out of our airbnb, Hostal Suiza. However, we left our backpacks here.
Since we had some clothes that were still wet from the amazing 360 Tour (Day 408), we decided to walk to Punta Carola to dry some clothes in the sun.
Our idea sort of worked, but the process was slow due to the changes in weather from sunshine to misty rain.
Once dry, we walked back into town to have an early lunch. Most of the places with cheap meals of the day were closed. After wandering around for a while, we finally found an open restaurant. At 11am, there was a loud announcement from the direction of the pier. The other customers at the restaurant told us that it was a time announcement.
Then went to the hostel to pick up our backpacks before walking to the airport. It was only 1.4km away. Along the way we bought some items from a bakery.
At the airport, we saw heaps of familiar faces from our time on the islands. The check in process took less than 10 minutes. We were told by the hostel that airport food is expensive. This was untrue. There was no food available at all!
Our plane was a small Airbus A319. Despite looking small, there were heaps of people waiting at the airport. We didn’t think they would all fit on the plane. But they did.
Guayaquil
The flight to Guayaquil was uneventful. From the airport, we caught a taxi to our hostel down town. We chatted with the taxi driver in broken Spanish. He was super friendly as he took us to our hostel, Departamento de la Iguana. The hostel was hard to find as the signs are really small and the building is shared with other businesses.
The driver warned us that there will be protests tomorrow. He also advised us to stay close by to our hostel and to definitely be inside before midday. We thanked him for his nice advice.
After we settled into our nice hostel room, we went out for dinner. It wasn’t late, but the streets were deserted. We went to the only restaurant that was open for some cheap Chinese food (Chifa). The food was really good, but we had a weird experience with the waitress.
She bought out two dishes. We had ordered two rice dishes. But one of these was with noodles. As we tried to explain this to her, she kept saying that we had ordered the noodle dish. Then another waiter came out and just dropped off our rice meal. The original waitress picked up our noodle dish and walked away without a word.
On the way back home, the streets were even more empty.