1. Off to Ecuador: travelling in style! July 2026

For this trip, I am travelling with a companion - my Dad, and we made the long haul transatlantic journey in style, in business class. For the hop to Madrid, that actually translated as sitting in the front few rows of a ‘normal’ plane but with the aisle and window seat between us and no one in the middle seat. There wasn’t any extra legroom but they did serve my Diet Coke in a real glass! The real joy of flying with the upper classes was in the airports, where we got access to the lounges; great rooms filled with comfortable chairs and huge buffets of food and drinks, all available for ‘free’ and to help yourselves. The Gatwick lounge included a full hot buffet, salad bar, crisps and dips, a create your own burger station, scones and clotted cream, an array of puddings and an ice cream cart. In addition were the coffee bar, fruit juices, ice buckets of wine and Prosecco, fridges stocked with soft drinks and a full beers, wines and spirits bar. I considered just spending the month there!

The 12 hour flight over to Ecuador thankfully had the ‘classic’ large seat with a complicated set of chair adjusting buttons and the ability to lie flat. Granted, that was in quite a wedge shaped ‘bed’ not dissimilar in shape to a small coffin. For a shortie like me, I had space to stretch right out and wriggle into various comfortable positions with my pillow and duvet while Dad was slightly more wedged in. Still abundantly better than an upright chair in the riffraff section! Dinner was served on china with a little table-clothed tray and included a choice of starters, mains and pudding! It will be dreadful when I’m unfunded and have to revert to economy seating again!

Arrival and passports in Ecuador all went quickly and smoothly and we experienced the absolute joy of all our luggage successfully completing the full journey with us. I did an actual little cheer and clap when I saw both my bags trundling round the carousel towards me. I’m always amazed at the disinterest and lack of celebration from my fellow plane mates when their bags arrive as thought that’s all they’d ever expected! After what seemed like around 24 hours of waiting, travelling and crossing time zones and the equator, having left the UK at 4.30pm on Saturday, we arrived to our hotel in the riverside city of Guayaquil in mainland Ecuador at 6am on Sunday!

After a couple of cups of tea on the balcony while we waited for the sun to rise and things to start opening, we ventured out to explore the riverside. What seems to be one of the methods for public transport and commute to work here is a cable car route that swings around the town and over the river. Rather than commute anywhere, we found you could buy a round ticket and just have a ride over the city rooves, across the river and back. We sailed over the streets, past a cemetery that rather than traditional burial plots offers blocks of building that appeared to have drawers for the people to go in and over the marshes with various cranes, flamingos and sea birds. After that and a quick coffee break for elevenses, we walked along the river and up to the cathedral with a park in front.

In that park, absolutely loads of iguanas have taken up residence in the trees and around on the grass. One minute a pile of lettuce is offered by someone and the next minute, it’s swamped by a pile of iguanas all feasting on it. You have to be a bit careful when standing under trees filled with iguanas as it seems their toileting habits amount to just letting rip when the need arises and what looks and sounds like the capacity of a decent sized bucket of lizard wee comes gushing from the branches above! The other resident reptiles of the park were terrapins who swim about in the pools and sun themselves on rocks, or rocks that look suspiciously like other terrapins. The pigeons can’t tell the difference either as they hop about from rock to terrapin while waiting for crazy local tourists to thrown them grain!

Day 2 by the river comprised a trip to the botanic gardens, another coffee shop lunch and walking along the river park. The gardens were a few miles away in the north of the city so required the summoning of an Uber driver, who arrived in a car roughly comparable to a oversized roller skate so in we squeezed and off we went. As usual the driving abroad was a slightly hair-raising experience, at speed, with  frequent beeping, weaving around cars and squeezing through gaps that a real-sized car would not have fit through! Nonetheless, we arrived to the gardens, paid our $3 entrance fee and proceeded to walk up the signposted path which hosted an impressive sprinkler system all along its length. Watering seems to take place throughout the day, drenching the plants and vegetation along with any visitors. Despite best attempts to dodge the moving sprinklers, there were frequent instances of getting watered as we rushed round the walkways. Fortunately, it was hot and sticky climate enough that liberal showers of water were quite welcome really!

The botanic gardens opened in 1979 and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that that was the last time any significant investment was received. We followed signposts to the Amazon experience to see the empty enclosures with just one poor little peacock peering out of one. We found the bonsai and cactus ‘gardens’ which were last tended to some time ago and then stumbled across the butterfly enclosure. It did have a nice waterfall through it and some pretty flowers but there were some signs that the butterflies were no longer ‘enclosed’ in the traditional sense. I do suspect we did later find where they are now ‘housed’ though …. Having said all of that, it was an interesting couple of hours drive there and wander through the massive trees and paths, spotting some huge birds of prey cruising round the tree tops too and some pretty flowers in amongst it all. None of the Uber drivers were keen to commit to a pick up in the obscurity of the hills so we ended up having to walk back down through a winding road and the local fly tipping site back to civilisation where we did then manage to get a lift home!

We rewarded ourselves for our adventures with a coffee shop lunch and then both wandered around the river and town spotting more churches and various monuments  during the afternoon. The roads here can be quite busy but, for a nice change, traffic does mostly stop at red lights. There are often zebra crossings at junctions although they are markers of where to cross when traffic lights are red and certainly not indicators of pedestrian right of way. There are also other randomly situated zebra crossings, which they have had the good grace to paint pictures on so we can all the treat them as the road decorations for which they are really intended! On one crossing only, I found that the lights never go red and people invariably give up waiting and just chance it by walking directly into the flow of traffic with varying degrees of confidence or ‘I’m sorry’ prancy walking. On further inspection of the crossing, I noticed a ‘push to cross’ button, which when I did as suggested, turned the lights immediately to red for safe passage. A couple of the people around me, who I’m fairly sure were locals, looked upon me as though I had performed actual magic as we all safely crossed! I’m not sure pedestrian crossings with buttons with ever catch on here!

The afternoon’s adventure was all followed by a delicious cup of tea. Cups of tea here, in the new travel kettle, do take a bit of time and planning as it is a fairly low powered kettle which when combined with the low voltage (110 V) electric supply in Ecuador, takes roughly 15 minutes to boil! Dinner on our final night was at a little local restaurant where I tried the ‘tonga’ - a local dish of meat of your choice covered in peanut sauce all poured over rice, accompanied by fried plantains (oversized bananas that don’t taste sweet) and then wrapped in some considerably sized vegetation! Tomorrow we shall pack up and hop a flight over to the Galápagos Islands for a few days near the beach.