Guiyaquil, Ecuador

After the long day yesterday, I was looking forward to a nice, slow, relaxing day today. We both slept like logs and rose just before 8am feeling refreshed and totally relaxed. After a leisurely breakfast, we headed upstairs to the Sun Deck to enjoy whatever the port had to offer.

Giuyaquil Port is some distance from the bustling city centre. In fact, where we were berthed was strangely reminiscent of the mouth of the Amazon, with lush green forests and a river tributary looking distinctly like its cousin due East.

Although there were several tours today, many folks seemed to be taking the opportunity to relax and simply spend the day on board ship, and recuperate from their respective journeys. There was much to see; in one direction, containers were being shifted about and loaded onto ships. Closer to us was a dredging operation, which was rather fascinating to watch in itself. A huge cargo ship alongside us was eased out of its parking spot with help from two tugboats; an operation that kept me happy for several minutes as I filmed and photographed it.

Tracey was busy watching the local wildlife. A small island just across from the pier seemed to be a haven for a large number of different species… Tracey was in her element… but she wasn’t happy…

The discontent was due to the fact that we’d forgotten to pack the binoculars. While the zoom on her camera is powerful enough for most occasions, it simply wasn’t good enough for bird identification on this occasion. Which led to one conclusion… with only two and a half hours to all-aboard time (1:30pm, for a 2pm sailaway), Tracey decided we would have to go into the city to try and buy a pair of binoculars. While this may sound simple enough, one has to consider the following factors…

[1] Pedestrian movement within the port area is highly restricted; the only way from the ship to anywhere is by catching the complementary shuttle bus to the port entrance. This appeared to come and go with no particular timetable; we’d been stood outside on the quayside for a good twenty frustrating minutes before it turned up.

[2] Once outside the port area, we had to find ourselves a taxi. Not just any old taxi, mind you; it had to be one of the officially approved yellow taxis, to ensure a safe passage and a fair rate.

[3] Once we’d found ourselves a taxi, we had to try and explain our intensions to the driver who spoke no English (and we no Spanish), with particular emphasis on the fact that we now had only an hour and a half before the time we had to be back on board ship. We’d been given the name of the nearest large shopping centre, where we might stand a chance of purchasing some binoculars, Mal du Sur. Instead, the taxi driver, for some reason took it upon himself to take us to another, larger shopping centre, Mal du Sol, which is situated near the airport, roughly 40 minutes drive away.

[4] After battling our way through manic city traffic, we arrived at the shopping centre at 12:15. We were teetering on the edge of asking the taxi driver to simply turn around and take us straight back to the port, and to forget about the whole thing.

Because…

[5] Even though the taxi driver was good enough to say that he would wait for us outside the shopping centre, we knew the instant we walked into the mall that the task of finding what we were looking for was going to be a massive challenge; a task that dwindled rapidly over the following 20 minutes.

It was with a slim hope that we approach the first person we came to and mimed a pair of binoculars, saying ‘beeen-occ-ularrr-ey’. A helpful finger pointed us down the mall and to the left… but there was nothing there that even remotely suggested what we were looking for. We went into shop after shop with our stupid mime and awful spaneeesh, each time we were directed to a different corner of the huge mall where we were greeted with forlorn shakes of the head and the goose chase simply became wilder as the minutes ticked by. With only 10 minutes left before we had to go find our taxi driver outside again, a lady pointed to yet another corner of the mall and said ‘Radio Shack’….

The Last Chance Saloon was open for one last sip, after which the stable door would be securely barred and bolted…

… and against all hope… there it was… an expensive pair of binoculars. Tracey duly whipped out her credit card and the deal was done with only seconds to go before 12:45. We dashed outside to find our taxi driver waiting for us, and the race to get us back to the port in time for 1:30, all-aboard time, was on.

We made it, of course, with no minutes to spare. We will never know if we’d stood any chance of finding beeen-occ-ularrr-ey in the nearer mall… probably not. The relaxing morning had been swapped for a little Guiyaquil adventure. An expensive adventure (the taxi didn’t come cheap; neither did the binoculars), but it was a mad dash that I wouldn’t have missed for the world.

The ship left the quayside at 2:15pm. For an hour or so, we were treated to some wonderful rain-forest-ey views, with lots of little homesteads by the riverside…

Next stop; Manta…