Views From Ecuador

In July this summer I traded warm showers, converse and my beloved laptop for buckets, walking boots and shovels, spending the month galavanting around Ecuador! It was through the organisation Camps International that takes school groups and gappers out to remote parts of the world, to work with local communities and to see the country. 

   In total we travelled to four parts of Ecuador throughout the month; the Cloud Forest, the coast, the Andes and of course the Amazon. We did a lot of tenting throughout our stay, I must say as amazing as it was, camping in the Amazon is not something I would do again anytime soon - the fear of getting back in the tent after realising we didn’t zip our tent up properly was just too much! There were also some more built up buildings we stayed in that felt like complete and utter luxury, I mean, you didn’t have to go outside for the showers.. what more could you want!

    We left pretty early in the season so were the first group to get started on the projects. It felt amazing to be helping these communities by doing something physical and tangible. We built a roof out of bamboo that made an outside dining room for the kids, complete with benches and two long tables. We started the build of a greenhouse at the school in the Andes, I have never shovelled straw and ahem cow dung with such a beautiful view in the background. In the amazon we were building the foundations for a community hall and in the cloud forest we planted a load trees as part of the reforestation programme. 

Quito from above

    I love cruising through the camps twitter and seeing how all the projects have progressed, and I must admit I’m much less bothered by the spiders and bugs back home now that I’ve had a ginormous cricket in my shower! I thought I’d share a few of the photos I snapped throughout the trip, I didn’t bring a big camera with me since I always seem to be the one looking through a lens back home, I decided not to spend too much time on this trip doing the same. If you want to hear more about how I recorded the month I did a post on my travel journal here.

Puerto Lopez

Otavalo Market

Mount Cayambe 

The local village i.e. time to stock up on chocolate supplies 

Our camp for 4 nights 

The Cloud Forest - a view from the track up to the reforestation site

Releasing my inner geography student

Some of the photos were taken on my disposable camera, you can probably tell which ones, I love the aged and imperfect vibe they have, much more so than the digital photos! 

The trip was pretty hard at times, mentally and physically, it was the longest and furthest I’d ever been away from home, but the whole experience was just incredible. If anyone gets a chance to go on a trip like this I'd 100% say GO - all the mud, sweat and tears are utterly worth it!
Georgina