Guayaquil

Three weeks of being fit and healthy was about to be ruined by ten days in Montanitas, the surfer village on the pacific coast. Bit of a crazy place to say the least. Unfortunatly on the overnight bus ride to guayaquil one of our three bags we put in the luggage hold mysterously disappeared. Typical for beth – 15months of travelling latin america and her bag gets stolen in the last two weeks. We got the security gards in the bus station to radio in for some police who asked us to write down our names and date of birth (!) on a bit of paper and personally escorted us to the police station where they waited around 2 hours for us to give a reference, then drove us around the city to change some money, asked if we wanted to have breakfast or buy new bikinis for montanita when we passed a shop window (commenting on which ones we´d look best in) and also putting on the siren at every opportune moment to get through traffic, striking up a conversation about why we weren´t married with children at our ´mature age´ and finished by giving us their number in case we had any more problems in guayquil or wanted to salsa dance. Reallly this kind of behaviour would be sexual harrassment in Europe, but totally acceptable in Ecuador. Wasn´t long before we had another bag stolen from beneith beth´s feet (the legendary food bag full of yogurt and granola). Two bags in 5 hours, pretty good going. Oh yes, forgot to say our incident at the police station made it to ecuadorian news. And i thought the guy shoving his mic in my face was part of the police wanting film evidence of our statments, turns out he was putting together a programme of ´bad things that happen in ecuador – our seciton was ´they rob the tourists´, a guy in montanitas recognised us from television.