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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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.

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.

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%.

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".

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