Friday May 17

Guayaquil is Ecuador’s biggest city, its port and commercial center, and a bustling place. In this way, it’s similar to Santa Cruz Bolivia, but the differences are significant: Ecuador is wealthier than Bolivia, so you see a bigger variety of cars on the street, better housing, more shops and fancy hotels, and lots more commercial activity. G-quil’s location on the country’s biggest river also provides a focus of riverside activity, mostly since 2000: museums, parks, cafes, strolling. The climate is hot year round, varying between wet season and dry. Just now it’s the end of the wet, so there’s still a lot of green and lots of heat and humidity: over 90 today in both temperature and humidity. The city is at 2o below the ecuator, and the sun is dangerous all year long. Ecuador uses the US dollar. Hence, gringos/as don’t struggle with the conversion, but poorer Ecuadorians have suffered the higher prices and loss of equity that resulted from the changeover in 2000.

Downtown Guayaquil is modern and recently refurbished. Guide books from 10 years ago talk about how dirty and dangerous a place it is, but that changed with a new mayor in 2000. The Malecon, a promenade along the River Guayas, is full of plantings, benches, historical markers and statues, playgrounds and ice cream stands (Pinguin (Penguin) is the quality brand and very good), bars and restaurants, a wonderful art and culture museums, a shopping center, and above all, people. At all hours I've been there, many teenage couples are necking and the specially-trained (and armed) tourism police are always within site. After 3 pm on a Saturday, families come out for ice cream and play time with their children. The evening we walked through, adults were strolling in the breezes off the river. Just as in Nicaragua, I find that families are very concerned about my safety, cautioning me against walking to the corner in the evening to make a phone call, and warning me to take off my watch before I go downtown for the day. In both cases, I presist, and never feel a concern about my safety.

The major downtown streets sport recycling stations for cardboard, glass and plastic, with detailed instructions about cleaning and drying the glass and plastic before recycling them. Hard to comply with this requirement if you've just finished a soda, and perhaps that's why cleanup people are also a big presence, with brooms, dustbins, and hoses. Unfortunately, the trash services don't extend much beyond a half-dozen downtown streets. As you travel by bus toward the neighborhood where I live, there's more and more trash in the gutters or piled in the streets, and fewer trash barrels. Raquel tells me that they have trash pickup 3 days a week, but lots of people just leave it out at any time or in the wrong place, in which case the city never picks it up. I'm particularly aware of this problem because of its impact on water quality in the river and estuaries: lots of trash is thrown there and with the rain, trash in the gutters and streets will eventually get washed into the water.

Even on the Malecon and along the estuary-side parks in fancy neighborhoods, the smell of untreated wastewater is noticeable. About half the city's sewage gets primary treatment, and half gets none at all. The land is very low and tides are strong, which means that the contaminated water gets pushed back and forth throughout the estuary.

Getting around the city involves city buses @ 25 cents, official taxis, or informal ones. We've used a number of the latter from home to various places. Seatbelts are infrequent, and drivers are loose with the definition of lanes. Passing on the right and left is common. Downtown, parking spaces are at a premium, and doled out by informal guardians of spaces, who use plastic lawn chairs to make sure a driver doesn't take a spot without a tip to the guardian. Makes me think of Boston after our snow storms, when residents are allowed 24-48 hours' use of a chair to guard their spot; imagine if we did this all year long!

Slot machine casinos are common throughout the downtown, and cyber and phone call centers are ubiquitous everywhere. It's hard to imagine that all these vendors can make a profit, although the rate of 50 cents per minute to call the US certainly helps the bottom line. Ecuadorans also use cell phones heavily in preference to a land line which is much more expensive. The city has a lively press, including several newspapers ranging from right wing to center to the red press which reports only about murders, robberies, and other bloody stories. There's good television news, and we are following the first case of Swine Flu in Guayaquil, from a student who arrived here from Miami. The 4 children in the family are closely following the Simpsons and Disney cartoons.


Claire