Final Summary from our First Trip to Ecuador

Here is my generic blog with less personal comments...

http://yecuador.blogspot.com/

After working for over two years here in Albuquerque at a really nice small software company with some really cool people, Michele and I decided to take three months off and go down to South America.

It was my first time down to South America, and Michele's second trip down there. She had gone to Peru in the past to visit Machu Pichu and the Cusco area.

The only place in Latin America I had been before was Mexico and going to South America was much more intense and third world like...

Originally, we were going to go to Ecuador and Chile, but after being in Ecuador for about one month, we decided there was just too much to see in this beautiful small country. Ecuador is about the size of Nevada, whereas Peru is much bigger. So we made the big decision to stay in Ecuador the whole time, for about 3 months...

What a lovely difficult journey. I tell people that it was the most incredible journey of my lifetime and at the same time the most difficult journey of my lifetime. In life, usually this is the case... Being on the edge one usually feels all the joy and sorrow of life in different breaths.

The people of Ecuador are lovely and very heartfelt. Every where we went people went out of their way to be friendly and helpful any way they could be.

We didn't know this before we left, but Ecuador is mainly a rain forest -- the whole country for the most part... Here in Albuquerque we get 10 inches of rain annually, whereas Ecuador gets around 100 inches of rain a year.. Quite a big difference, and certainly made the trip kind of wet... In fact, it rained almost every single day we were there... A sunny, clear, blue sky New Mexico day in Ecuador never happened once. So we missed the weather we were used to...

We loved speaking Spanish the whole time, and needless to say our Spanish is much improved. We were able to get along just fine, especially if we knew the context of the conversation. A lot of times, people would just start talking to us out of the blue and at that time we were usually pretty confused, especially when going for long hikes in the mountains with some native Quecha people. We met some lovely native South Americans who guided us around some really big steep mountains.

All in all, the food wasn't that great. They have fantastic fruits and vegetables in the markets, but in the restaurants where we were eating they basically served rice and beans and some type of meat or chicken. You just couldn't get a really big salad or a plate of vegetables for a meal, it didn't exist anywhere except in the really fancy restaurants. If in the future we moved there to live, having our own kitchen for cooking would be great for cooking the foods we love... They are there, we just didn't have easy access to a kitchen to cook our own food.

The prices were great, everything was really cheap. Ecuador is on the US dollar, so there was never any money exchange. We just showed up in Ecuador and started spending our money, pretty wild and crazy.

Accommodations, food, transportation were all very reasonable. Average lunch prices were about $1.50 per person. Our rooms for two people were around $20 a night. A ten hour bus ride was ten dollars.

If we go back next time, we could rent a small house for one month for around $200 per month. The average wage in Ecuador is between $200 - $300 per month, so people are doing actually pretty well -- cause the food in the markets is cheap, and everyone in Ecuador has more than enough food to eat.

The markets are packed with food, so by the end of the day there is a lot of extra food, and anyone that doesn't have food is provided for... People have big hearts and take care of each other, and they also took care of us very well.

When you compare Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia to the southern part of South America they are very different. So Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay are a whole different world, and thats really the main reason we visited Ecuador. We wanted to see what it was like to live in the Andes in a basically rural nation where the natives are still in the majority.

Basically the countries that Simon Bolivar freed from Spain around the revolution of 1820 are the Andean nations plus Columbia and Venezuela. The Andean nations are considered to be Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia even though the Andes actually run from Venezuela all the way down to Patagonia.

The favorite part of the trip for us was the jungle which we visited in the southern part of Ecuador. The towns of Vilcabamba and Zamora were absolutely lovely, and we were there for about one of the three months. The average stay in Ecuador was around 7 or 8 days, and during our journey we moved around 14 times, staying in some places for a short time, but mainly staying in places we liked for about two weeks.

One of the highlights of our trip was teaching English, which I posted on my blog.

Ecuador is really not that far, especially from Miami its less than four hours, but we flew from LA, which is more like six or seven hours. On our flight home, we flew over Central America and Mexico at night, and I was blow away by how populated Mexico really is. There are small towns pretty much the whole way. Where as in the southwest, you can fly for miles at night and really not see many lights, pretty interesting.

So we are back here for awhile, until we figure out the next step or journey... Hope all is well with you.

Best regards,
Michael