Travel Origins (Part 1) - Guayaquil, Ecuador - The Iguana
- Jamie Melrose
- Jul 22, 2019
- 6 min read
Updated: Jun 22, 2020
The heat and smell hit me like the waft of warm fart, unpleasant yet familiar. After 4 hours on a bus, 2 hours of which were spent watching Jurassic World 2 in dubbed Spanish, I was in Guayaquil. A month earlier I had spent a night here before travelling onwards to Montañita. I spent my one night confined in a hotel room eating ‘Chinese food’; cowering from heat, crime, and earthquakes (the Guayaquil 3). Now I was back.
Steaming Guayaquil straddles the western bank of the creeping Rio Guayas. It’s far enough inland from the freezing Humboldt current to succumb to sweltering equatorial heat. My Grandad had described the place as a sticky, busy town. 50 years on and it had remained true. The city is home to over 2 million people making it Ecuador’s largest. And it’s hot, too hot.
If ever there was a bad backpacker, it was the man who stumbled off the coach into Guayaquil Terminal Terrestre in early May 2019. Like a dad on holiday, I carried a backpack, a wheeled black bag and a suitcase weighing 23 kgs. It was hard-shell, with tiny wheels fit for a smoothly lined European airport. The contents of the bags included superfluous items such as cufflinks, clumpy office shoes, and a bright yellow tie. My bag screamed, confusingly, ‘middle-aged holiday attire’. My worried face asked, “what have I got myself into?”.
Indeed, why was I here? My quarter-life crisis had hit hard, and I responded the best way a millennial could. Travel. I quit my cushy job and signed up to an English teaching course in Ecuador. The plan was to teach, or travel, or both. I hadn’t worked it out yet, but what I did need was change. After a 5-week course in Montañita I was now a qualified English teacher, a qualification I didn’t particularly want. Nevertheless, it was my passport. And so, with the well-thought-out part of this escapade completed, I found myself in Guayaquil with no plan, lost in possibilities.
Acutely aware of Guayaquil’s crime statistics, I clung to my bulky belongings in the station like they were my true love. In an act of courage and bravery, we took a taxi. We showed our driver the address of our rented Airbnb apartment on Google maps. He said he didn’t understand and drove us anyway. He looked no older than 18, his windows were covered by cardboard and sealed over with tape. We sat in the dark, tense, with little idea of our surroundings. Obviously, he got lost and only after asking a police officer were we guided to our correct apartment. The cost of this fiasco, 8 dollars. If you are in Guayaquil, use Uber.
We rented a dingy 1-bedroom apartment somewhere in the city for 3 days. The first day of my adventure was spent hiding in the airconditioned bedroom watching the demise of Game of Thrones, occasionally venturing into the kitchen to cook, eat, and sweat. The flat overlooked red-tiled rooftops, plump shirtless men sunning themselves on balconies, and puddle strewn streets. On the second day, we visited Mall Del Sol, Guayaquil’s premier shopping destination, where I took profound enjoyment in window shopping for flip flops. If this was travelling, travelling was easy.
On the third and final day, we figured we best try and see what the city had to offer. I did not know how to ‘travel’, but I would give it a shot. Parque Seminario, or more commonly known as the Iguana Park, seemed sufficiently strange. We travelled in an airconditioned Uber. From the window, I observed immense trees hanging over brown waterways. In amongst the streams of traffic exists a multitude of roundabouts adorning obscure giant statues of birds and Indian warriors. We passed through rich neighbourhoods, houses heavily fortified behind electric fences. The Uber driver spoke at length about how great his city was. I nodded politely and silently disagreed.
Iguana Park was indeed full of iguanas. This urban menagerie also includes terrapins and giant goldfish, but, like a stray dog at a night club, no one paid attention to them. I bought lettuce from a small weathered woman for 50 cents. She made a point of telling me that the lettuce, brown and mouldy, was for the iguanas and not for humans. I began handing out the goods to the reptiles. More iguanas soon began scrambling down the trees until I was engulfed in a sea of green. I fed the iguanas, and all was well. Unfortunately, there is always one dickhead.
Defying all I knew about the capabilities of iguanas, a young and roguish male burst through the bushes and scrambled across the backs of larger iguanas. The young buck, with as much personality as a doll-eyed iguana could have, bravely disregarded the dominant head-bobbing of larger iguanas. For this, I admired him. I reached out and fed him a particularly brown piece of lettuce. The imposter cocked his head, slowly opened his mouth, and lurched forward. In swallowing the lettuce, he wrapped his jaws around the tip of my finger. I jerked back in shock. I looked at the iguana, and he looked back. I searched for something, anything, but there was no remorse in those black eyes. This upset me more than the ticklish bite. I threw the lettuce on the ground and left the mass of iguanas to tussle over the remnants.
I returned to my girlfriend and told her what had happened. Upon further inspection, a tiny red droplet had emerged from my finger wound. I thought nothing of this, but my girlfriend was adamant we have it checked. I washed my finger with a hose and said that should be fine.
We strolled down the promenade overlooking the Rio Guayas. The wide river carried trees, giant clumps of earth and plastic chairs towards the Pacific. With every step in the intense heat and humidity, my girlfriend seemed to slump further into an unrecognisable crawling beast. We rested under a giant tree and enjoyed the views of colourful houses on the hillside. My complaints about turning into an iguana from the bite only encouraged my girlfriend to look up if you should get an iguana bite checked. There was surprisingly little information available online with regards to this injury; evidently few are stupid enough to be bitten by a creature that moves as fast as my girlfriend does in the Guayaquil heat. We needed a proper adult. My girlfriend consulted her mother. Mum said get it checked.
Our search for a medical professional took us away from the heavy security of the promenade and through a nearby market. With this, we plunged into chaos. I kept my hands glued inside my pockets, gripping my wallet and phone tightly. In the tropical heat, my pocketed hands were rubbed into a redraw rash. Rushing through the central market I was offered stolen phones, Adidas shoes, and flame-grilled corn. We arrived at what turned out to be an emergency hospital. After explaining my ailment, the doctor told us, to no one’s surprise, that my particular case was not an emergency. A nurse suggested that I visit the clinic down the road to receive a tetanus jab.
At the new clinic, I embarrassingly explained what had happened. By now, the blood had gone, and the tiny graze had healed up. The nurses had to take my word for it. My finger had begun to feel increasingly numb which added to my urgency. With my procedure imminent and the injection being prepared, a senior nurse walked in and had the young nurse explain why I was there. Her face dropped. The senior nurse stared at me with intensity. She raised her finger in front of her face, inserted it into her mouth and produced a comically loud sucking sound. And with that, I realised the insignificance of my injury. My finger regained full feeling, and I left.
Having survived a violent attack, I had a new lease on life. We opted to move on from Guayaquil to the city of Cuenca. We would postpone any life decisions until we were in the relative cool of the Andes. There we would plan our next move; be it travel or teach. On the remarkably comfortable bus, I nursed my wounds, both finger and machismo. As the bus rumbled to a start and slowly puttered out of the city that I loved to hate, I decided that to travel was to experience something different, and in being bitten by an iguana I had definitely experienced something different.
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