Travel-Stained Life

Things we learned: Currency: US Dollars Cities Visited: Quito, Otavalo, Baños, Guayaquil, Galapagos, Cuenca, Loja Learn Spanish here, it’s affordable. If you have flexibility in scheduling, book tours in or near the location of where you’d like to go because rates are considerably lower than booking in your own country. Exercise caution when crossing the [...]

Ecuador is not exactly a traveling foodie’s top destination.  To the best of our knowledge, prior to our trip to South America we had never eaten Ecuadorian food before.  As a matter of fact, we had never even seen an Ecuadorian recipe or restaurant in our time on this Earth.  That includes our three years [...]

The town of Cuenca is the second to last stop on our way out of Ecuador.  We decide that Cuenca is the perfect setting to learn Spanish.  It is small, affordable, quaint, and a notch in a long series of Spanish speaking cities that lie ahead of us.  After some research and a referral from [...]

Our last morning on the Galapagos was a bittersweet day.  We were both amazed at how quickly time passed and were sad that our time had come to an end on the islands.  On the other hand, our poor bodies were screaming for some well deserved time on solid ground after four consecutive nights on [...]

As we returned from the Galapagos Islands and began talking about how we would summarize our experience there, it became clear that photos could only truly do it justice.  With that, we decided to develop a photo essay of the animals that we saw (and were able to photograph/videotape) while we were there. Land Animals Land Tortoise [...]