He was already in Ecuador finishing a month of work when I got there end of October with Felix (4) and Kika (almost 2). I travelled from Holland via Madrid and Quito to Guayaquil. You have to excuse me that a lot of the time my focus is on travelling with young children because if I can’t keep them happy, everything else stops.. As I understand that this is sometimes a bit tedious for those of you not in that ‘frame of life’, I’m starting a separate blog about travel with young kids, where I can elaborate to my hearts content about the ins and outs and ups and downs of travel with under fives.
In Ecuador, the people you see on the billboards advertising fast food, or on the outside of huge new looking malls do not look at all like the people in the cars driving past them (nor do they look like the people walking on the streets, between the cars selling stuff)
The people on the billboards are blond and have blue eyes. But the people of Ecuador (the actual consumers) look something like this:
Francisco says that apparently many ecuadorians think that they look like Europerans. Only when they come to Europe they realize that they don’t.
For a minute I wondered if this was something like the relatively high proportion of Jamaicans in New Zealand commercials. You’d think by watching tv ads in NZ that a huge part of the population is of African descent and speaks with a Jamaican accent.
Now I think it’s more like what Kiran Desai said in an interview I read in Holland in October, how a very large proportion of the population of this world grow up thinking that the place where they are, is not the place to be and that they should strive to leave.
Somehow that sounds very familiar, isn’t that how we’re all sometimes made to feel? Or is that just me?
Guayaquil
What to do with a waterfront? On our first weekend in Guayaquil we hung out at the Malecon!
(if you live in Auckland this may be interesting
http://publicaddress.net/default,3708.sm#post3708)
(if it can be done in Guayaquil?.....)
Guayaquil is the biggest city in Ecuador and suffice to say that most people in Ecuador do not belong to the worlds lucky eight percent
Still, guayaquilianos realized something.. a good public space can save a city. With the Malecon a space was created that people were proud of and that they actively use in their daily lives.
I have a thing for public spaces because in Auckland they somehow don’t quite seem to work, but I sorely miss the good European ones. A good public space makes you want be there and hang out. I’ve taken trains across continents just to be in famous public spaces. They don’t involve Mac D’s and don’t have cars, that’s one thing I know for sure.
The Malecon 2000 in Guayaquil a strip of public space of 4 kilometers long, meticulously paved, it has gardens, art, fountains parks, playgrounds, exercise areas, restaurants, several open air food courts, monuments and morphs itself past two art galleries, an imax cinema and ends at the Cerra Santa Ana.
The Malecon is constantly positively humming with the people of Guayaquil. Old and young, rich and poor… People come here during their time off with the entire family, with their boyfriend or girlfriend (novio/novia), they come here to see and be seen, to eat icecream, to play and to hang out. I think people need a place to play.
I have to point out that the Malecon is ONLY possible in Ecuador because every ten meters there’s a uniformed and armed presence.
Me with Kika in my sling on the Malecon on a Sunday afternoon..
Note.. the tidal river delta of Guayaquil does obviously NOT have pretty blue water like in Auckland.
Something to do for the kids, for only fifty cents a go.
Some more fun for fifty cents.
Some green, some benches to hang out on. Some iguana’s in trees, some ducks to feed.
Some art to stand between.
What else do you need?
The malecon became one of our favourite places to go in Guayaquil.
You can watch people and let young children run without there being the immediate danger of traffic running over them.
For fifty cents you can make the kids INCREDIBLY happy by giving them a ride in a silly train.
And even at 11 o’clock at night, when I was besides myself with jetlag and passed out, Francisco could take the kids for a run (their bio clock obviously told them it was 8 o’clock in the morning) and a play on the Malecon and it would still be buzzing with friendly life.
The Malecon then ends at the Cerro Santa Ana, which is a little hill covered in tiny houses that seemed to have grown on it, leaning on top of and next to each other like in a Hundertwasser picture. Not so long ago it was apparently a no-go slumzone and now it has all been done up in many freshly painted colours with hundreds and hundreds of steps taking you up and down past people running tiny businesses in their front rooms or just hanging out talking about Dutch football (an ecuadorian player is the current star of PSV Eindhoven). People have been stimulated to start these businesses and it’s now a place safe to go because there are guards and people of the Cerro get paid to help keep the place clean. Nice one Guayaquil.
