Most people are not aware that the Galapagos Islands are a part of Ecuador. In fact, many people don’t seem to even know where Ecuador is. It’s a small country in South America, and if you have a map handy you can find it just south of Colombia. Here are a few other things you may not have known about it.
The Currency Is The U.S. Dollar
You won’t have to exchange your money if you travel to Ecuador from the United States. The same bills and coins in your pockets will work just fine. In fact, although the country does produce some of its own coins, the U.S. dollar is the only official currency, and all bills are imported from the United States. Be sure to bring as many small bills as you can, however. Many small shops won’t have enough change for a twenty-dollar bill (and some not even enough for a ten).
Ecuador Isn’t Hot
Because the equator runs through it, most people think that the country is hot. But it only gets really hot in the Amazon basin. Quito, the capital of Ecuador, sits at almost 9,000 feet, and is generally spring-like most of the year. Once in a while it may reach 80 Fahrenheit, but the daily high temperature is more commonly in the 60s. Nights are cool, but never below freezing. Most of the cities and towns along the Andes mountains have similar weather.
Guayaquil, the largest city in Ecuador, can be hot and humid, but it doesn’t get anywhere near as hot as in many parts of the United States. The average daily highs are in the 80s year-round, with lows ranging from the high 60s to high 70s. It almost never gets close to 100 degrees. The moderate weather is due to the city’s proximity to the coast.
All of the weather near the sea is moderated by the Humboldt Current, a cool-water Pacific Ocean flow that runs along this part of the South American coast. In Manta, for example, it has never been 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and is usually in the 70s and lower 80s. You will even need a sweater for the cool evenings in some beach resort towns.
Ecuador Has Big Mountains
Think you know where the highest point on Earth is? It depends on how you measure it. Because of the bulge at the center of the planet, the peak of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador is the furthest point out from the center of the Earth. Or, to put it another way, there is no place on the planet where you can stand closer to space or the sun.
Chimborazo is about 20,700 feet high, and covered in glaciers. There are several other mountains in the country that exceed 17,000 feet. The most famous may be Cotopaxi. Due to its almost perfect volcanic cone-shape it shows up in magazines and on post cards regularly. Its peak is more than 19,000 feet above sea level. Further south, Las Cajas National Park is full of high altitude hiking opportunities for those who like cold wet weather and high places.
Other Little Known Facts About Ecuador
Ecuador is a cheap place to travel. You can still get a decent meal at a sit-down restaurant for under four dollars as of 2008. Hotel rooms in many towns start at $20 or so, and even less if you know how to negotiate (be ready to walk away and the price may drop). Bus travel is not only inexpensive, but more comfortable than in the States, with plush seats, curtains on the windows, and often a movie playing.
Traveling in Ecuador is relatively safe as well. The country has had a fairly stable democracy (the occasional coup d’état or electoral chaos is normally non-violent and doesn’t seem to interrupt daily life). Ask around about the worst parts of the larger cities – big cities in all parts of the world have there dangerous areas.
By: Steven Gillman
Posts Tagged ‘Andes Mountains’
Ecuador – What You May Not Know
December 15th, 2009Deep Inside Colombia – Crossing The Andes With A Surfboard
November 18th, 2009
I’ll never forget the look on the face of that Colombian campesino man. My wife just explained to him in Spanish that what I am holding under my arm is indeed a surfboard, despite the fact that we were standing in a Colombian village that was located somewhere in the middle of the Andes Mountains, hundreds of miles away from any ocean. After hearing this news the man made a joke about us getting bad directions. He then flashed a smile that revealed a mouth full of rotten teeth. Soon after that he shook his head, tucked his hands into the front pockets of his hand-woven Inca style poncho, turned, and moved on down the only street in his town. When the man reached the center of town a gust of wind swept down the street and blew the black fedora hat off his head. As I was watching him chase after it through a cloud of dust, I thought to myself; “I gotta’ get to the ocean.”
I was beginning to feel like a fish out of water. Surfers cannot stay away from the ocean for too long, or they start to “dry out”. As I was standing on that dirt street in that dusty little town, I realized that I had not seen the ocean in over a month. More importantly, I had not surfed in it. Halfway through a two month excursion across the country of Colombia, in South America, we were on our way to a small Caribbean beach resort on the northeastern edge of the country for a much needed break from the madness we had experienced so far on that trip. We had spent the holidays traveling from Bogotá to Medellín, and then back to Bogotá again to meet and visit with various different members of my wife’s family. There had been some mishaps along the way involving pick-pockets and miscreants. Up to that point it was not fun, and we will leave it at that.
Traveling on a tight budget in a foreign country is the best way to experience the true culture of that country, but it can be quite taxing on your soul. We could not afford plane tickets to fly all over the country, so we had to take busses and taxis instead. Some of those bus rides took over two days to reach our destination. We traveled through some of the most remote areas of Colombia, changing busses and hailing taxis the whole way. Along the way we saw some of the most beautiful scenery on earth, and experienced some very interesting, intense, and strange things. Black magic and evil curses are practiced in many areas of Colombia, and I cannot say any more on that subject, for fear that you would think of me as crazy. There are things that cannot be explained in this world, and a lot of them happen in Colombia.
There were other things that happened to us that were even more terrifying than black magic. Let’s just say it’s never a good thing to have your bus stopped in the middle of the night by rough looking men with machine guns on a winding, dark, mountainous road. That is whole other story for another time.
Back to our main story; we were about four hours North of Bucaramanga, and waiting to board yet another one of those colorful busses. All I could think about at that moment was surfing and relaxing at this place called Tayrona. I was told you can sit in your own thatched-hut “choza” and watch the waves from your front porch. For those who are not familiar with the sport of surfing, that sounds about as good as it gets for a surfer.
It had not been easy carrying that surfboard all over Colombia. We landed in Bogotá in the middle of the country a month before, and I had been schlepping it around with our other luggage from one bus or taxi to the other ever since. It was like I was living my own little version of the movie
Fitzcaraldo, and my surfboard was the ship that was being carried for many miles across dry land. I was determined to make the effort pay off.
While we were waiting for our bus in that little mountain village we were inundated by the usual local people trying to sell us stuff. My wife, being a Colombian native did most of the talking for those negotiations. These little villages along the main roads of Colombia survive on money from people who are just passing through, or waiting for a bus. The local indigenous people sell everything from bags of purified water, to homemade “empanadas” (a meat and potato filled turnover made with corn-meal dough). My wife and I had been surviving on food and water provided by those people for most of our trip. Amazingly, neither of us had been sick yet. Albeit, most of this food had been delicious, you have to wonder about the cooking and cleaning practices in a town that has no running water. Something tells me that if the cook had a choice between using their last bucket of water to wash their hands before cooking, or having water to drink the next day, they’d forego the cleanliness. I tried not to think about stuff like that on that trip. I only thought about how much flavor those homemade items had with their homegrown ingredients.
People sure know how to cook in Colombia. Wow! The food in that country just seemed to have a lot more flavor than the food I was used to in the United States. We really experienced the authentic food of Colombia; “buñuelos, “pandebonos”, “arepas”, you name it and we tried it along
the way. We were on a budget, yet eating very good food. The people who made this food were as poor as one could be, but they could make food like no-one else on earth. The freshness, lack of pesticides, and the nutrient-rich soils also have a lot to do with why the food tastes so good in Colombia.
After we ate our share of “empanadas” that we purchased from a little old village woman carrying a hand-woven basket, we were ready for a freshly blended fruit smoothie. There were always several of these little smoothie stands in every town that we stopped at along the way, and we always made sure that we sampled at least one. No matter how small of a stand, the vender always had electricity to run their blender, ice box, and boom-box. I immediately ordered a couple of “tomate de árbol “smoothies at a nearby stand, and then we sat down on an old wooden bench provided by the smoothie vendor.
We were told by the driver of the last bus that our next bus should be along in “no time at all”. It had been my experience up to that point that this bus driver may, or may not be right. Sometimes the bus came right away and the transfer went smoothly. Other times we ended up waiting long periods of time between transfers. Those ones did not go so smoothly.
The mountain roads and leftist guerilla laden areas that these busses travel through can cause long delays, to say the least. Hanging out in that small town in the middle of nowhere in the foothills of the Andes Mountains waiting for a bus was quite nerve-racking. The local people of those types of towns were always very suspicious of anyone that stayed behind after a bus came through. Most people just passed right through. They were especially suspicious of a Gringo with a surfboard and a Colombian wife. There was a war going on in that country. Everywhere we went everyone wanted to know whose side we were on. As we were sitting in that dusty, one-horse town in a remote area of Colombia, I knew we were in for a long, harrowing wait.
By: Michael Connelly