1702 Been out for walk, at some small cheap Chinese restaurant for langostinos con curri con chaufa. Went into department store where they said 15 for SIM plus credit, left as seemed expense compared to what read on web. Walked, no major rush, seeing bit of city. Ended up at a Claro store (super regimented, and they insist on ID before even assigning you a ticket for place in virtual queue, tho think dept store wanted ID too) paying the same and a bit less convenient but meh. Walked through Parque 7 Junio, quite a few cats, presumably strays but looked in fair condition.
1735 Pretty good, bill 13 (with 500ml coke zero), will make it 15, then back to hotel via shop for some water. May go out tonight but will go back and maybe investigate Galapagos cruises and do a bit of laundry and stuff first whatever. Place is Chifa "Dragón De Oro".
0007 Didn't go out tonight, had Spanish lesson. Been looking into the fucking Galapagos since then. I was heavily leaning towards a cruise, as that sounded ultra safe from a spider perspective. But fuck me is it expensive. There's not even any logic. One website at least grades the boats by luxury, yet the 'backpacker' tourist class boats in some cases cost more than the first class ones for the same number of days. And the single person supplement is typicaly 70-80%. One boat has a 25% supplement, but when you try to look into booking it's a complete nightmare of wankily over-complex forms and no information about single supplements and sometimes no price quoted for flights, which you have to buy off the same company. The whole thing just screams 'suck the money out of the rich bastards'; I expected to go on a website, see a clean simple (if high) price quoted and pay it. Even an online booking.
The single room supplement can be avoided if you're willing to let them assign you a roommate; I really think that would be pushing it, especially for say six or seven nights.
If I momentarily assume the website is right, the best price I could get for a four night cruise is about a grand, plus flights. This is an insane per day expense. I'm not even that desperate to go FFS, there's just a kind of 'well I was going to go and I don't want to back out' feeling.
Most the online responses I've had suggest it's unlikely to see a spider in my room or elsewhere (but the odd one appears to back up the book I quoted that they are all over the fucking place). And for well under a grand I could stay in fairly good hotels. But am I going to get any peace of mind? Also if I'm going independent it seems a lot of activities involve walking around and am I going to just be in a constant palpitating funk every time I walk near a tree, or for that matter when I don't? I mean, I asked for advice and generally people seem to be saying it's fine but it isn't registering. Fucking hell.
The comment suggesting they are everywhere says the mainland is *worse*. I may be misinterpreting this. Why the fuck can't I get a clear fucking picture of the situation? Half wondering if I should stay out of Ecuador altogether.
Frankly - and I can't help thinking there's a meta-theme developing here, cf earlier comments on taxi safety - it seems like asking for advice or doing any kind of research is a bad idea. By the sounds of it, whatever the worst cases, 'most' people clearly don't have any spider encounters, so if I'd just gone without thinking about it I'd probably have been fine, and if something *did* happen at least I wouldn't have been worrying about it in advance. Now I'm starting to think I just can't risk going (except on a cruise, and that's so expensive it crosses my 'go fuck yourselves, I don't want this that badly' line) and that pisses me off when the general tone of the advice is 'don't worry about it' and it would probably be OK.
I don't know why, maybe I will e-mail a hotel and ask about the risk. I'm not likely to trust their response, since they have a motive for lying, but WTF, I am not sure *what* I'm looking for any more, it can't do any harm and might be interesting.
0128 OK, my skin is fucking crawling. I do find a scientific report on the web that in 2011 (ie when I was there) one was encountered for the first time in Iquique, Chile. They are also present in India (though don't know where). Now on the one hand this is deeply disturbing, on the other hand it does sort of encouragingly suggest that mere presence doesn't imply visibility. On the other hand, they are presumably far more common in some places than others, and presumably sighting frequency variest accordingly. I am hopefully-not-delusively reassuring myself that in truly urban environments the things are not too common.
I do also note that they are apparently very timid and scared of humans, so one might hope that after terrifying their victim they don't hang around.
As I think I already said, I do wish I could get a clear picture of the true risk of encountering these or similar fuckers in any given place.
0252 Finally in bed. Bit fed up. Meh.
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