TRAVEL JOURNAL
Regular readers will remember that we shipped our Land Rover to South America in 2016. Since then, we've visited the continent five times, exploring for three to four months at a time.
Thankfully we were at home in South Africa when the pandemic struck, but it did delay any travel plans we had at that point. We only managed to return to Peru, where the Landy was stranded, in May 2022. We drove a route along the Andes Mountains, going north, and briefly crossed into Ecuador before crossing back into Peru and locking the Landy up again outside the city of Tumbes. Ecuador's biodiversity impressed us so much that we decided to go back a year later, in April 2023.
This time we crossed the border from Peru with trembling hearts. Because of the clampdown on drug trafficking in Colombia, many cartels have moved their operations to Ecuador and they use the city of Guayaquil near the border as a base. Just before we entered, the decapitated body of a gangster was hung from a bridge in Guayaquil as a warning to rival cartels…
But our fear was tempered somewhat by the excitement of returning to Ecuador, a small but diverse country. (It's only 21% the size of South Africa.) From the border, we mainly followed the Andes as we drove north, experiencing a different landscape around every corner. Ecuador can broadly be divided into five habitats: the Andes, the coastal plains, the cloud forest and the Amazon rainforest to the east. It also owns the Galápagos
