Stranded in Guayaquil: Saturday 14th to Tuesday 17th February.

Saturday 14th (Valentine’s Day)

So there we were, after our wonderful fifteen-day South American adventure, stranded. The fuel leak on the port engine of our plane couldn’t be fixed, so we weren’t going anywhere soon.

The confusion soon clarified. We were given vouchers for a hotel and ushered onto a coach to take us there. Foreign Office advice said we should not leave the airport, but we had little choice but to accept what was on offer. By this time it was midnight and I didn’t feel like arguing.

About an hour later we arrived at the Hotel Oro Verde. We were met by an armed security guard, which did nothing to put me at ease.

I am diabetic, and had eaten nothing since two in the afternoon except a packet of pretzels. My blood sugar was getting low. We checked in, and asked if I could get something to eat. After some fuss, they brought a couple of stale bread rolls and some fruit. We ate and went to bed.

We woke up fairly late on Saturday morning but early enough for breakfast. While we were having breakfast and trying to work out what to do with this unwanted extension to our holiday we met an American man who offered to be our guide to Guayaquil. Initially I wasn’t too keen.

For me, there is a point in every holiday, when the holiday is over. At that point all that is left is to get home. That point was the Panga ride from the ship back to the airport the day before. I didn’t see this as an extension to the holiday; I saw it as an inconvenience. Also, given the nature of the city we were stranded in, I wasn’t planning on doing too much touristy stuff.

Diane, however, was keen to do something. So we took him up on his offer. We never actually found out what a young single man from Miami was doing in Guayaquil in the first place.

Guayaquil has a cable car system called the AeroVia, which runs around the city. There are a lot of wide rivers in Guayaquil, so it is quite an efficient way of transporting people around. It is not really a tourist attraction, but it could be. It gives amazing views of the city, is cheap to European eyes and safe. It ran from just outside our hotel to the suburb of Durán.

We got off the cable car in Durán to stretch our legs. The first thing I noticed were three cops, or possibly soldiers, in full combat gear, faces masked and carrying M16 rifles. Like the armed security guard at the hotel, I did not find this to be a reassuring sight. I didn’t take photos, because they didn’t look as if they wanted their photos taken.

Things perked up after that. We hadn’t realised, but Carnival was about to happen, in a couple of days time. In a small park by the terminal, we found various groups practicing for a Carnival Parade.

We spent about half an hour watching the dancers, before deciding to head back to the hotel. Opposite the hotel was a coffee shop. So we decided to have coffee. It was part of a chain, sort of the Ecuadorian equivalent of Starbucks or Café Nero. There was a security guard (unarmed) on the door. The coffee and cakes were good though.

We had lunch at the hotel, then had a discussion with our friends Helen and Tony and a few others who had been on the ship with us. We set up a WhatsApp group to share the information we had been given. By this time we had been given details of our flights home. We were going to be among the last to leave. Our first flight left Guayaquil for Quito at four in the afternoon on Monday 16th, getting us back to Heathrow, hopefully about two thirty in the afternoon on Tuesday, going via Madrid.

With everyone’s travel arrangements sorted, we just had to decide what to do with our remaining forty-eight hours. I didn’t feel like venturing out again. The hotel had a swimming pool, so I decided to go for a swim.

There was a Valentine’s Day celebration at the hotel in the evening. This meant we had to have dinner earlier than we would have liked. After dinner we went to Helen and Tony’s suite and chatted and played games until it was time for bed.

Sunday 15th

We woke up reasonably early, showered and went down for breakfast. The breakfast buffet at the hotel was very good. It had a mixture of Ecuadorian and Western dishes, a good variety, well prepared and presented.

After breakfast, there was no way Diane was going to sit around the hotel all day. She had been Googling and found this place; the Museo Antropologico y de Arte Contemporaneo

We took a taxi from the hotel. We found the museum eventually. It seemed that every road the driver wanted to take was closed for some reason. We learned a few Spanish swear words on the journey. At the museum we were met by yet another armed security guard. By this time I was beginning to get used to them.

Entry to the museum was either free or very cheap; I can’t remember if we paid something like five dollars or whether it was free. The museum itself is split into two parts: the Anthropological part has artefacts covering about ten thousand years of pre-Colombian Ecuadorian history. The Modern Art section has a selection of very contemporary art.

The pre-Colombian section was interesting, the artifacts on show were not that different from what we had seen in museums in Peru. That was not that surprising as the Inca culture was very widespread. There were also many artifacts from the pre-Inca period.

As a complete contrast, contemporary Ecuadorian art:

It was an interesting and quite different gallery/museum to visit. I don’t know of anywhere quite like it in the UK. If someone decided to amalgamate the British Museum and the Tate Modern, that might get close. It is worth a visit if you are ever stuck in Guayaquil for a few days.

Coming back to the hotel, we weren’t sure how to find a taxi, but it didn’t matter. We found that the museum was just across the street from an AeroVia stop, so we caught the cable car back to the hotel.

While we are on the subject of modern art, we found this sculpture/relief on a building next to the hotel.

I can’t find out all that much about it, except that the style is described as mid‑20th‑century Latin American modernism. I liked it though.

After lunch, I decided to go for another swim. This time the pool had been taken over by a large number of very noisy kids. I settled for having a beer and reading my book by the pool instead.

In the lift on my way down to the pool, I bumped into the Captain and First Officer of our KLM flight, wearing their uniforms. I asked them if that meant the plane had been fixed. They said that as yet it hadn’t, but that they were on their way home. People from our group were beginning to go home. We were all on different flights. Some people going via Panama, some via Bogota, and a couple via Rio. It can’t have been an easy job, finding flights for three hundred people at short notice.

We were going to be among the last to leave.

Our friends Helen and Tony were already on their way home via Bogota, so after dinner we had a drink in one of the bars, read our books and went to bed.

Monday 16th to Tuesday 17th: on our way home.

We didn’t get up particularly early this morning. After breakfast, we did our packing, and then Diane went shopping. She had found a shop in the hotel arcade selling “vegetarian ivory” jewellery, which was quite attractive and reasonably priced. She bought some for herself and some to bring home as presents. Later, we went across the road for a coffee, came back, had lunch, and then caught the hotel’s shuttle bus to the airport.

Check-in for the first of our three flights home was at 15:30. It took just under an hour to reach Quito, leaving us with about two hours to kill before we had to check in for the flight to Madrid. The flight left about ninety minutes late, possibly due to the rather long queue of people in wheelchairs waiting to board.

I did not enjoy the flight. I am not fond of overnight west to east flights at the best of times. I didn’t like the seats we had been given, they were immediately behind a bulkhead, there was enough legroom, but no footrest. The food was mediocre, and to cap it all, because of the late departure, the flight landed in Madrid leaving us less than forty minutes to make our connection.

Diane’s lack of mobility, saved the day. Without her wheelchair driver waiving us past queues and through checkpoints, I don’t think we would have caught our flight.

We made it by the skin of our teeth and two and a half hours later we were back in a grey and rainy London.

We made the flight, but our suitcases didn’t. They were still in Madrid. There were about ten people who had been on the Quito flight. None of our bags had arrived. One person had an air tag on her suitcase, which was telling her it was still in Madrid. We assumed that everyone’s was still there. Diane took the pragmatic approach, and decided that it saved us doing the laundry when we got home.

The bags arrived a day or so later

With that our South American adventure came to a close.

Thinking back on this part of the adventure, I could have made more of it. I know that Guayaquil is a dangerous city, but by taking sensible precautions it should have been safe enough, at least during daylight hours. However getting past my “the holiday is over” feeling would have been more difficult.