Another night bus took us from Huaraz to the coastal town of Trujillo in Peru, known for being a place to surf. Along with our group of Australian and Canadian travellers, we arrived at 5AM, which is never a very convenient time to arrive anywhere and search for a hostel. After a brief search we all set up shop in the garden of a hostel and eventually got on to breakfast, after a snooze on the benches to recover from the lack of sleep on the bus. Just a very short time in Trujillo helped us decide it didn't have anything in particular to offer us, so we farewelled our travel companions later that morning and hopped on a bus straight away to Guayaquil, Ecuador. We spent the rest of the day and night on buses, crossed the border in the middle of the night and finally arrived in Guayaquil the next morning. It was a long haul.

For us, Guayaquil, Ecuador's largest city, was never intended to be a place to see on its own merits, so we weren't particularly disappointed when it turned out to be pretty unappealing, a concrete jungle of sorts. Our mission in Guayaquil was to organise ourselves to head to the Galapagos Islands, so we spent the whole day running around between travel agents, trying to find the flights and deals that would suit us best. The pressure was on because we knew a failure to book anything would end up in us spending more time in Guayaquil than we wanted to. After a busy day, we managed to book our last minute flights and cruise, and looked forward to heading to Santa Cruz Island in the Galapagos the next morning.