Ecuador

We drove in to Ecuador on the 4th of January. This was our slowest border crossing ever, it took 6 hours! 1.5 hours to get out of Colombia, there was a long line to get the exit stamp for our passports. Then only about 30 minutes in line to get stamped in to Ecuador, no questions asked so that was easy. But then the TIP for our car took 4 hours! Why? Nobody knows, there wasn’t a problem, it was just very busy and inefficient. Well at least it was free.

We drove straight on to Ibarra to spend some time on the campsite Sommerwind. This is run by a German guy who knows all the good garages and other places in town. For this reason many overlanders spend some time (sometimes even more than a month) on this campsite working on their vehicle. At time of writing we have been here for a week and a half as well. We now have no wheels and Kilian is also spending a lot of time under the van. He may write an article about it later. We are also getting new fabric for the van because after 8 years our curtains had mould an tares in them, our organisers where falling apart and we also had had enough of it, time for a change. We will post photo’s later. There are several other overlanders around so it is nice to have some company.

So far we haven’t seen anything from Ecuador other than the road that led us here. It was uninteresting apart from the 3 police checks in less than 3 hours. Apparently Ecuador is known for its many police checks, but the first three went without a problem so lets hope it stays that way. In Ecuador they use the US dollar for currency so that’s easy. Our first impression of Ecuador is that’s just a little bit richer than Colombia, with more and better choice of products in the supermarkets and more easily available parts for the car. On the downside, it is also more expensive here.

Traffic

Traffic is, as it was in Colombia, horrible. Especially the bus and truck drivers are almost without exception speeding, taking over in blind corners, blind crests, etc. Think of anything you were told not to do in traffic, and they do it. But it seems we are the only ones concerned about it, nobody else seems concerned. One thing that stood out are the painted blue hearts on the roads. You see them quite often, and it took some time, but we realised that these represent traffic victims. By the way, these blue hearts are local efforts to show how dangerous the streets are, the government has nothing to do with it.

speed bumps are ridiculous again in this country. most of the time they are very high and very square, so you need to do it in 1st gear.