June 1- means the vacation's about to end

       I flew back to the mainland and now I'm in Guayaquil. Somehow, I managed to book a fashionable condo with a balcony overlooking the malecon in a bourgeois district. 

This is a sharp and welcome twist from the last two hostels I stayed in.  

Kim picked me up at the airport yesterday and I got here around 5:30 p.m., just in time to walk out to buy detergent, diet coke, and some snacks. After a delicious, $25 seafood dinner, I came home and crashed.  

      Here is the housing on the mountain above my high-rise, complete with crowing roosters in the morning.

     This restaurant along the malecon is where I had dinner last night.  

     I'm doing my much-needed wash now, while I enjoy the sunrise over the Island next to us. 

     Kim is picking me up at 9:00 to go a couple hours to a beach town that she has been raving about.  It will be a good time to chill. (Although it wasn't 2 seconds before I got in the car from the airport that she started talking a mile a minute about things that are going wrong in her life. Then, she looked at me and said, "So what was your favorite part about your trip?"

  I'd have to say it was the blissful and pristine nature of the island Floreana, where the only people I saw were the two that came to my hostesses happy hour at her little Tiki bar.  And of course my new friend from there, Claudia. We pretty much did everything together for the two days that I was there. 

      So, as I was starting to say, it will be good to sit in the truck in silence-hahaha, and not feel the bumping of the waves smashing my backpack into the seat! 

    I really didn't spend any time on the beach because I was moving at such a Herculean speed, so this will be a welcome Journey and destination.

The internet speed is so much faster here, where it takes me like 2 seconds to load a picture onto here.  On the islands, if you could get the internet, it took about 5 to 10 minutes to upload pictures! 

     The water however is still not good to drink so everyone has purified water in multi-gallon tanks. 

     So, all the islands had their own personality:  San Cristobal was the welcoming into the Galapagos Island, where people and tens of sea lions were generally friendly.  The next island in the chain, Santa cruz, was known as the nightlife/partying Island.  I think it is the largest of all Islands. Floreana is known as the almost uninhabited Island, where peaceful lava rock paths and beaches surround you. It was the most prevalent home to iguanas.  And last, Isabella is very spread out and I didn't get a personality read on it at all, although it is also surrounded by beaches.  

    My host of this condo, like all the other people virtually that I met in Ecuador on the mainland

 Hasn't been to the Galapagos. She told me the word she got on it was that it is 1) a place where you have to walk a lot, and 2) very expensive. She's right.  Paracatu cercanos de living in the street is even More expensive than anywhere on the Galapagos Islands.  The normal dinner on the islands was anywhere from 15 to $18.  

     (And because on the Galapagos islands, they don't use plastic, it was really hard to find a Coca-Cola sans sugar in a bottle.

    Time to change the laundry...