Expat Community > Ecuador

DUNMOVN
Joined 2011
Posts: 1991

Weekend in Guayaquil

12 years ago

A weekend in Guayaquil is something to write home about. I was invited by two lovely Ecuadorian ladies to visit them in their home city. They made me feel welcome and did their level best to present Guayaquil in the best light. Well, I’ve got news for those who love large cities, Guayaquil reminds me of Newark NJ. It is situated about 30 miles from the Pacific Ocean on a very polluted river, that when tide rises and falls is a muddy quagmire.

The city has absolutely no urban planning and is a vast wasteland of featureless communities with small cheap cookie cutter townhomes or villas, wall to wall with no green spaces and very few parks. The children play soccer in the streets. We did visit a very large park obviously thought out by the developer who sold the idea to the government in return for no small amount of pocket change. I saw about 12 tennis courts that had never been used--no nets—Ecuadorians do NOT play tennis, at least not the Ecuadorians for whom the park was intended. There were basketball courts without any hoops, a swimming pool with no water. I saw no soccer field or volleyball courts, two sports Ecuadorians love. The entire place was abandoned, it was very sad.

The weather was hot, humid and the air quality reminded me of Los Angeles. The view of the surrounding hills was obscured by the pollution of millions of cars without any pollution controls. My hostesses asked me to drive, which was fine with me. I have driven all over the world, so I took our lives in my hands and off we went. I suggest that formula one race planners do some recruiting for future race drivers in Guayaquil. I once learned to drive on the left in about 10 minutes—We flew into Heathrow airport in London, rented a car and I drove into central London. But Guayaquil is something else entirely. The painted lines on the roads are completely ignored and so are the speed limits that are posted every mile or so. By the grace of God, or my driving skill, we made it home safely—certainly some of both.

I invited my hostesses to dinner at a place of their choosing. We wound up dining at the Hotel Oro Verde, certainly the most expensive hotel in the city. There is one in Cuenca as well and it is also terribly overpriced. The dinner for the three of us including a bottle of a nice Chilean white wine was $110 including tip. The food was a 2 on a scale of 5 and was about 50% overpriced.

Then we went to the “garden spot” of Guayaquil, the Malecon. It is a very park like setting that runs along the river. There are museums, food venders, street performers and tens of thousands of people including I am sure quite a few pickpockets. I saw no off street parking, but cars everywhere on the streets, many double-parked. It took us about 30 minutes driving around to find a place to park and finally gave a policeman $5 for a spot and to insure the car would be there when we returned. If you can imagine such a place in Newark along the polluted Hudson River, you get the idea.

Urban planners in many US cities have successfully created downtown magnet areas that have been very successful, but there was something there to begin with. For the government to have spent untold millions creating the Malecon in downtown Guayaquil was like putting lipstick on a pig. But then I am a cynic.

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