Articles tagged with "Ecuador"
Ecuador suits an unhurried trip better than a comprehensive one, and the altitude is the reason. It also extends real statutory benefits to older people, and those benefits are not restricted to citizens in every case.
Ecuador has some of the more advanced disability legislation in the region and the built environment has not caught up with it evenly. This guide is specific about which places work, which do not, and what to ask before booking.
Afro-Ecuadorian history does not begin with a plantation. It begins with a wrecked slave ship whose survivors established their own polity in the northern forest, and it is carried today in a musical tradition that is internationally recognized.
Ecuador keeps two calendars simultaneously. The Catholic year brought Carnival, Corpus Christi and the saints; the Andean year kept the solstices and the harvest. Most of the best festivals are where the two meet.
Ecuador names its indigenous peoples in its constitution and recognizes Kichwa and Shuar alongside Spanish. That shapes daily courtesy in ways a visitor notices within a day, if they know to look.
Ecuadorian food divides the way the country does. The highlands cook with potatoes, maize and pork; the coast cooks with fish, plantain and lime; the Amazon cooks with river fish and yuca. Very little crosses between them.
Ecuador carries a real travel advisory and a separate state of emergency, and they do not cover the same places. This guide keeps them apart, because a reader who merges them will be wrong about the coast in one direction and wrong about Quito in the other.
Ecuador has an excellent long distance bus network, short internal flights that save a whole day, and roads that are spectacular and slow. Choosing between them is mostly a question of altitude and time.
An Ecuador itinerary can cross from a cold paramo to a humid rainforest to a hot island in three days. This list is built around layers rather than seasons, and around the two things visitors most often get wrong.
Ecuador uses the United States dollar. That removes the single largest practical friction in South American travel and replaces it with a much smaller one, which is finding change.