Back in a busy city

We arrived at our hotel in Guayaquil and it was good to have a stopover for a couple of nights to plan the next bit. Quayaquil was very hot but actually quite a nice city. They have some very big shopping malls here and we thought it would be an ideal place to try and get Jody's camera fixed as yesterday - our last day in Galapagos thankfully - it started playing up and eventually stopped working. Unfortunately the parts required would have to be ordered from Panama and now it was almost Christmas so it was going to take weeks to get fixed and we certainly didn't want to hang around here all that time. So we resolved to get it fixed in Peru and in the meantime look at a few replacement options. That was also easier said than done. We hunted high and low through several shopping malls and even went off on a wild goose-chase for an independent camera seller. All to no avail. It appears there are only about 6 models of cameras here - anywhere - and a fairly inexpensive camera in England was going to cost several hundreds of pounds here. Reading a few forums on the internet, it seems as if anyone here wants to buy a camera, they get a flight to Miami, buy it there and fly back and it's still cheaper than buying it here. So we shelved that idea too and bought a bus ticket to Alausi!