We only spent a brief time in Ecuador, visiting the city of Guayaquil. Guayaquil is the largest port in Ecuador, and as such is the economic center of the country. Quito, the political capital is high in the Andes. At 9,300 feet it is one of the highest capital cities in the world.
 

	Our first stop in our tour of Guayaquil was the Parque Bolivar, right across the street from St. Peter's Cathedral. At the center is an equestrian statue of Simon Bolivar, the liberator of Ecuador (among many other South American nations).
	We quickly learned that there is something worse than pigeons! As the Guayaquil area became more and more urbanized, the local Iguana population became compressed into the local parks. Iguanas like to climb trees and to sit on branches overhanging the walkways. They eat the flowers and other vegetation in the park, and their digestion is rapid and continuous, much to the chagrin of those who walk under the trees.
	Totem poles are not just in the Pacific Northwest!	We arrived during holy week, which is a holiday in Ecuador. Everything was closed, but they opened the Municipal Museum for us. Since the Inca's had only conquered Ecuador about 100 years before the arrival of the Spanish, they were regarded as just another wave of invaders, and the real interest was in the extensive pre-Inca collection (not just pre-Columbian.)
		They had a couple of dioramas showing life in the early days of Guayaquil.

From the museum, we went down to stroll through the park along the waterfront drive, the Malecón.