Big G's Place - My Stay in Ecuador

I arrived in Quito, Ecuador 15 April 2004. My trip will be comprised of three distinct parts. First I have a part time job with B&B Parque Italia / Islazul Tours. Second I want to explore Ecuador while improving my mediocre Spanish. Lastly I plan to write a mountaineer's guidebook to the highest volcanoes.

The B&B Parque Italia and Islazul Tours are run by an Austrian-Canadian, Erich Lehenbauer, in Quito. Well over a year ago I found his site, Ecuador Travel, and it's offer of a "vacation job" to extend a poor traveler's stay in Quito. I bookmarked it but never really thought there was even a possibility of actually going to Ecuador. However the weeks of unemployment became months and the months became a year and I still had not found more than a few hours of work here and there. I returned to his site on a whim and reread his offer. One of the things he wanted done was a professional rewrite of his fairly large website. Hey! Also there was a possibility of leading backpacking trips. Hey! Suddenly going down to Ecuador became a fun way to refresh my resume. As no other jobs were turning up for me, part time webmaster work in Ecuador began looking better and better.

Working 20-25 hours a week is going to leave me with a lot of free time. Fortunately there is much to do and see. Ecuador is very high on many tourist's destination lists. The Galapago Islands are a very big gringo draw as well as the native markets, Inca ruins at Ingapirca (and another Inca Trail to hike), and visiting the jungle. Also the Avenue of Volcanoes brings in international climbers to taste high altitude mountaineering cheaply and without long approaches to the mountains.

Yes I plan on writing a guidebook to the mountains. Since I plan on climbing the 10 5,000+ meter volcanoes (and others) anyway I thought that I would write my own guide. The two that are available now are mediocre and the author of one of them died in an avalanche a few years back so updates haven't been coming. By now I certainly know what people like to see in guidebooks and I don't see why I can't provide that. I've never tried to do anything like that before, but on the other hand, I am active on SummitPost so I have in fact written up mountain and route descriptions for climbers (albeit skimpy). Because of it's limited scope I should have it mostly done by the time I leave Ecuador in six months.