Ecuador

By Dawn Wohlfarth Arteaga

Ecuador is the smallest of the Andean countries, just smaller than Italy. With the Northern Coast, Southern Coast, Andean Highlands and the Amazon Basin packed into its small surface area, and the Galapagos Islands off the coast, the nation boasts a little bit of everything South America has to offer. 

Ecuador's size and diversity is its biggest draw. In the morning, you could plunge into the sparkling blue waters of the Galapagos Islands where playful sea lions will swim through your legs and hammerhead sharks will slither by without giving you a second glance. By early afternoon you could be sipping a cappuccino in the capital's historic colonial center and taking in the beauty of Spanish cathedrals built over the ruins of the Inca Empire, set against the breathtaking backdrop of the Andes. At sunset, you could pull up to a remote jungle lodge in a dugout canoe, carved the same way Amazon tribes have been doing it for thousands of years, while listening to toucans, parrots, and howler monkeys making live the dense forest all around you.

You may imagine that this diversity, the low cost of living and the abundance of cheap travel services, along with luxury travel options, would make Ecuador one of the most popular destinations in South America for travelers of every sort. However, perhaps due to its lack of superlatives (it doesn’t have the staggering Andean peaks of Peru, Brazil’s vast expanses of jungle or the clear Caribbean beaches of Colombia and Venezuela), the country has been relatively undiscovered and there are still plenty of opportunities for remote and adventure travel. Some of the most popular activities in Ecuador are bird-watching, mountain biking, kayaking and hiking.

Other travelers come to volunteer, often as language teachers, to help with re-forestation (the rainforest is being stripped at an alarming rate), or to work with one of the many NGOs operating in the nation. Many also choose to spend a few weeks studying Spanish in Quito, currently the biggest language-learning center in South America.