Galapagos: Las Islas Encantadas – Day Zero

I'm starting with day zero because the week leading up to our vacation in the Galapagos Islands is a whole damn story in and of itself. We signed the contract for our new apartment, which has gorgeous views of the city and is overall incredible even though I've had to spend the last few days fixing everything in it, and we spent most of Thursday and Friday (up until our buseta left for Guayaquil) just getting all our stuff from the Coloma's house into our apartment. Fortunately, we were able to spend the night in the apartment Thursday night before spending a (useless) half-day at work on Friday. After work, we bolted for the apartment to get all the rest of our errands run before our buseta left in five hours. We didn't even eat lunch, or at least I didn't, and we packed food for dinner to eat on the way to Guayaquil. There was a construction delay on the highway somewhere along the descent from the mountains, but we didn't mind much because we were watching a movie on Leslie's laptop. When we finally arrived into Guayaquil, our hotel sent their car to pick us up at the buseta company's office (normally that costs too much more than a taxi, but we got a deal for booking it with a travel agency in Cuenca), and we cut rhough town over to the hotel Iganazu. It's a great hotel in an incredible location on a mountainside overlooking the town. It has wifi and breakfast is included with your room. Depending on the day, the best part of the hotel is either that it has a pool (because it's so damn hot in Guayaquil, Ecuadorians call it “El Horno”) or that you can't even tell you're in Guayaquil where you're at the hotel. I have another great story about Iguanazu but it'll have to wait until I write about the day on which it happened. They ended up giving us the “family” room, with two bunk beds (4 beds total) and a double bed upstairs in a loft. Everything in Guayaquil has air conditioning, so our hotel room did as well. We ended up going to sleep pretty much immediately after arriving to the hotel, and that should be enough of a leadup into day one of our Galapagos trip.