In Ecuador, the Frugal Traveler Tries Luxury | Hacker News Reader

In Ecuador, the Frugal Traveler Tries Luxury

nytimes.com

68 points_abnl29 comments

Ecuador is an amazing country - while driving south I thought I would only spend a month or so, I wound up spending 5.

In my opinion it's like 3 countries/climates glued together - you can be on the Pacific getting sunburned at 100F+ for the morning, drive a few hours up into the high Andes and climb a 20,000 foot glacier capped volcano, then drive a few more hours and drop down into the amazon to watch monkeys swing through the trees.

I climbed 20,000 foot Cotopaxi - http://theroadchoseme.com/cotopaxi-summit

Then lived in it's shadow for months - http://theroadchoseme.com/down-time

It's a supremely beautiful country, and the people are very friendly. Highly recommend.

There goes a wasted work hour reading your blog and remembering our overland road trip from UK to South America in an old VW Westfalia.

Would love to get back out on the road, but 3 kids now (as opposed to just one for the trip) means it is unlikely.

100% agree with your description. I came there almost by an accident and stayed for 6 weeks in Quito and Amazon. I think for me personally it was the country with best ratio of expectations (they were low because I knew almost nothing before) and impressions (very high, easily my favorite country I visited so far).

What's network access like there? Is wifi widely available?

Ecuador is surprisingly well built up. It was definitely my biggest surprise when traveling South America. People who know it mostly from the economic collapse around the turn of the century will be surprised at how much progress they have made.

As an added bonus for US travelers, they use the US dollar as their primary currency. No obnoxious money exchanges to deal with! The only thing to watch out for is change, because Ecuador mints some of their own "dollars" that obviously won't be worth anything in the US.

Is it easy to change the local 'dollars' for true US dollars? Is it 1:1 or are they less valuable?

I don't know, I avoided them entirely except for a bit of change I kept as a souvenir.

One of the biggest surprises: Walking up to an ATM and withdrawing US cash with no fees at all. Not even the bullshit "you're not a member of our bank, so we'll charge you an extra dollar".

Too bad they're so heavily indebted to China, and thus proceeding with plans to sell to them the oil exploration and mining rights to 1/3 of their remaining pristine rainforest.

I failed to climb Cotopaxi -- I got to about 5,400m. I could have gone a little further, but doubted I'd make it to the top at the time, and I don't think I was wrong.

It probably didn't help that the refuge was being rebuilt, so we had to sleep at 3,500m and start the climb from the car park below the refuge, which added on 500m to the climb. But more realistically, I live at ~20m and had only spent about 5 days in Ecuador before trying the climb.

Do you think 50% of people successfully climbing is true? From asking people before and since, I think it's more like 5-10%.

And don't forget the Ecuadorean kidnapping industry. I know a guy who was kidnapped four times (his family owns a banana plantation in Ecuador)

A friend of mine knows a guy in Columbia with no fingernails. He was kidnapped for 18 months, they wanted him to reveal the real owner of some land where his name was on the title. They removed his fingernails one by one.

That puts a bit of a damper on my own enthusiasm for South America. An uber driver from Brazil once asked me how I liked Brazil and I said "it was fun to visit, but what about all the kidnappings?"

And he said "Oh, so you know what's going on"

Yeah I do. Really it's not a region to visit carelessly.

(I travel a lot, I'm in India now)

If you are just a tourist who does not own the title to a banana plantation or anything like that, are you still at risk?

My experience is that you don't. Ecuador is a lot of fun.

That said, you should always be careful. In Ecuador, particularly in Guayaquil, be careful what taxi you take. Make sure it has a meter, and if possible use a radio dispatched taxi (i.e. call). Beyond that, it's like most places you're likley to visit: Stay away from "bad" areas late at night, be aware of your surroundings, etc.

The only foreigners that I constantly see getting themselves into trouble are those who deliberately come down here to do the things that they can't easily get away with in their own countries.

It dampens your enthusiasm for the whole of South America? The threat of kidnapping can't be so bad everywhere. How about French Guiana, which is a department of France and in the EU? And some of my colleagues describe exploring stunningly beautiful areas in national parks in Brazil and Argentina, where the few people they encountered were mostly other European scientists and photographers.

My scariest travelling experience was in Quito. I was walking up the steps to the statue of the virgin Mary, which the guide book recommended gave a great view.

About a third of the way up, some girls aged about 10 shouted some Spanish to me. I only understood "tu muertas", and after some confusion returned to the hostel.

Apparently, the path goes through a slum, and it's pretty dangerous -- the police don't go there. My guidebook was out of date!

An Ecuadorian tourist I met didn't have a camera, since it had been stolen shortly before his holiday. He seemed to think this was pretty routine.

"tu muertas"???? What does that even mean? You obviously don't understand any spanish at all. LOL

Please don't be rude on Hacker News.

I apologize if you and others felt offended by my comment, but I feel even more offended when I see people who are ignorant and insensitive to other cultures throw random gibberish and try to pass it off as fact. "tu muertas" doesn't translate into anything if you look it up in a dictionary. Perhaps the op was consumed by his/her own prejudice that a misheard/misunderstood statement from a 10 year old girl felt like a death threat??

I understand enough French and Latin (and have watched The Pirates of the Caribbean) to know that the word for "die" in Spanish will sound something like "mourir", but with a different ending.

Google Translate says "morirás". Can a "tú" be added for emphasis? (That's how pronouns work in Latin.) The girl was very anxious.

She was also holding a squashed plastic bottle, and making slashing motions across her throat. One of the other girls was doing the same to her leg.

The most recent review on TripAdvisor [1] says "My travel buddy and I got mugged by 3 street hoods with a knife on the steps going back down into Quito".

The British government [2] says, of Ecuador, "Muggings and pick pocketing are very common ... avoid travelling to ‘El Panecillo’ hill on your own or by foot"

Can you think of an alternative explanation?

[1] https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g294308-d315612-...

[2] https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/ecuador/safety-and-...

I didn't feel offended; it's my job (I'm a moderator here) to ask people to stay civil.

I'd probably find it insulting too if someone acted like a little girl was making death threats when in reality it was they who didn't understand her/my language. But the comment never said that. I read it that the girl was trying to protect him, and the phrase in broken Spanish was what he heard—which of course would be in broken Spanish, since he doesn't speak the language. In other words, the comment was honoring the little girl, not insulting her.

From the bottom of the article:

>Seth Kugel has written the Frugal Traveler column since June 2010. This is his last column. His successor, Lucas Peterson, will start later this month.

Based on the author's experiences and appreciation for integrating into developing culture over being coddled, I can only hope for him that he's leaving to join the Peace Corps or similar.

Sounds like he'll be writing a book and has been producing a video series http://sethkugel.com/14-and-a-half-months/

I wonder why they changed writers. I wonder if Seth got expenses paid by employer.

I don't know about this specific circumstance, but travel writers I've known got free trips from the tourist agencies, resorts, etc. in the countries they visit. Disclosure is not typical.

Based on your preference for being coddled, I can only hope one day you move out of your mama's basement.

Aside from Ecuador being awesome (which it is), here's the takeaway, buried at the end of the article:

But perhaps I simply never learned to travel luxuriously.

It's absolutely possible to get the novelty he's after while living well, but it's not the sort of thing you can switch on or off. Getting comfortable with affluence is a process.

>It's absolutely possible to get the novelty he's after while living well

Can you expand on this? I don't necessarily disagree but as a frugal traveler(bike tourer) I can't begin to imagine how I'd have similarly novel experiences traveling affluently.

My personal approach to this balance is to stay in hostels/home-stays and use standard local transportation, but still go to expensive restaurants/shows/tours on occasion.

I don't think 'novelty' is what the author was missing in the luxurious portion of his trip. In fact, he seemed like he got plenty of novelty during it. I would suspect that what was missing was authenticity and risk with the opportunity for serendipity.

I do believe it is quite possible to still incorporate luxury into risky/adventurous/serendipitous travel, but I think you will find that affluence will tend to isolate you and make it more difficult to find authenticity, regardless of how comfortable you are with your affluence.

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