My wife and teenage daughter and I will be in Ecuador for 3 weeks in December and our teenage son is currently living in Portoviejo participating in an exchange program. Ecuador has been on our radar as a retirement option and this will be our first trip to explore that. We have traveled internationally and are generally not paranoid about safety. However, our son is adamant that will be robbed if we use the busses. We were unwilling to take that seriously until, a few weeks ago, he and his friends were robbed (at gunpoint) on a bus. It seems odd that this is not mentioned in either the moon or lonely planet guidebooks. Is it perhaps more common in the Portoviejo-Guayaquil area? We had planed to fly from Quito to Manta and then bus to Puerto Lopez, on to Guayaquil, and then to Cuenca for several days. That does not seem like such a good idea now.