Ecuador is an amazing country - while driving south I thought I would only spend a month or so, I wound up spending 5.<p>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.<p>I climbed 20,000 foot Cotopaxi - <a href="http://theroadchoseme.com/cotopaxi-summit" rel="nofollow">http://theroadchoseme.com/cotopaxi-summit</a><p>Then lived in it's shadow for months - <a href="http://theroadchoseme.com/down-time" rel="nofollow">http://theroadchoseme.com/down-time</a><p>It's a supremely beautiful country, and the people are very friendly. Highly recommend.
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)<p>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.<p>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?"<p>And he said "Oh, so you know what's going on"<p>Yeah I do. Really it's not a region to visit carelessly.<p>(I travel a lot, I'm in India now)
From the bottom of the article:<p>>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.<p>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.
Aside from Ecuador being awesome (which it is), here's the takeaway, buried at the end of the article:<p><i>But perhaps I simply never learned to travel luxuriously.</i><p>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.