We flew to Ecuador courtesy of LanChile. They offered an amazingly low fare from Dallas to Quito via Miami. This is the 767 we flew. It's too bad that their ticket agents screwed with us on our way back to the United States. Next time I fly to Quito I'm taking Continental non-stop from Houston.

Here is a view of Quito from the Techo del Mundo restaurant at the top of the Hotel Quito. That's Mount Pichincha in the background. If you think it's a nice view by day, you should see it at night.

The yellow line Lori is standing on is the equator: 0°0'0" latitude. The Mitad del Mundo monument is behind her.

People buy and sell just about anything at the traditional outdoor markets. This one was in Latacunga, which is south of Quito.

The Andean countryside is green and covered with a patchwork of fields and orchards.

A Tigua Indian sells paintings at the Hosteria La Cienega. Each indigenous tribe in Ecuador is known for a particular handicraft, and the Tiguas produce colorful paintings of life in the Andes.

Here Lori and I stand on the suspension bridge over the Rio Pastaza outside of Baños. There's a steep switchback from the highway down to bridge, which is the only way to get to...

...the Mantel de la Novia waterfall, which I always enjoy visiting. These pictures don't do it justice. The Rio Pastaza flows down from the Andes and is one of the tributaries of the Amazon River.

This is the Saturday animal market in Otavalo. Plenty of cows are for sale.

Anybody want to buy a llama?

Lori and our taxi driver, Hugo, examine wares at the Otavalo market. The Otavalo tribe is known for textiles, but everything from pottery to jewelry to bootleg CDs are sold at the Otavalo market.

Lori and Hugo stop for flowers on the way back from Otavalo. Hugo has been taking me and my family around Ecuador since we first visited in 1988. Many of the flowers sold in the United States are grown in Ecuador.

This is Lago San Pablo, just south of Otavalo.

On the left, Lori is standing in front of the statue of the Virgin on the Panecillo. The Plaza de la Independencia, Quito's central square, is on the right.

When I was a teenager, traveling to Ecuador was a yearly occurrence. Thanks to the Fulbright program, my father was sent down to teach at the Catholic and Central Universities in Quito during the summers of 1988 and 1990, and so the entire family went along with him. I went by myself in 1989 and 1993 to visit the friends that we had made.

However, by 2001 it had been eight years since my last trip to the wonderful Andean nation, and I felt that it was time to go back. I wanted to see how things had changed since my last visit, and I also wanted to Lori to finally see my "home away from home."

We had discussed making the trip during the summer of 2001, but it wasn't until we discovered an amazingly cheap airfare on LanChile, the Chilean airline, from Dallas to Quito (we had to spend the night in Miami on the way down, but so what?) that really enabled us to make the trip. So in the middle of July we packed up, left Denton, and flew down to Quito for two weeks of vacation and exploration.

Even though it's located just south of the equator, Quito is 9,600 feet above sea level so it's actually very cool. The high when we left Denton was 98 F. The high when we arrived in Quito: 57 F. Lori and I certainly enjoyed the cool weather, and neither of us had a problem with altitude sickness.

A lot has changed in Ecuador since my last visit. For example, their economy was "dollarized" in 2000 and the US dollar is now the official currency of the entire nation. This was good in that no longer did I have to keep up with the daily exchange rate or get screwed by the banks when changing money. However, the downside of dollarization was that everything was much more expensive than before. One of the things I used to love about Ecuador was that the cost of living there was obscenely cheap, compared to the United States. You could get a bunch of bananas for the equivalent of a nickel, a soft drink for the equivalent of a dime and a good dinner for four people rarely cost more than ten bucks. As of 2001, however, just about everything cost about as much as it cost in the States. Lori got tired of hearing me complain about it all the time; she thought the prices for food, transportation, lodging and the like were still reasonable, and I guess they were, but it still wasn't like I had remembered it and for that reason I was disappointed.

The Techo del Mundo on the top floor of the Hotel Quito is my absolute favorite restaurant in the entire world, and I took Lori there for a wonderful dinner our first night there. We didn't stay at the Hotel Quito, however - a bit too expense for us. We stayed at the Alston Inn on Juan Leon Mera instead. It's clean, friendly, popular with tourists and we recommend it. It also has its own internet cafe, which came in very handy.

At first I wasn't sure if he'd still be around after all these years, but happily I was able to find Hugo Herrera, the taxi driver from the Hotel Quito taxi pool that has been taking myself and my family all around Ecuador since 1988. I arranged a couple of overnight trips with him.

Our first trip was south, to the spa town of Baños. We drove out of Quito along the Panamerican highway and made several stops, including one for several hours in Latacunga because it was that town's market day. Baños itself is a really beautiful town, with the hot springs and the green valleys and the amazing waterfalls. It's too bad that it's totally screwed if the active Tungurahua volcano ever decides have a serious eruption (as of the summer of 2003 it was spewing ash and lava all over the place). While in Baños we stayed at the Hotel Sangay, which is located on the edge of town right across the street from a hot spring-fed bath.

We spent the night in Baños and, after seeing a couple of waterfalls in the area on Tuesday (including my personal favorite, the Mantel de la Novia waterfall in the Pastaza river valley), we returned to Quito.

For our next trip, Hugo took us up to Otavalo. Again, we made several stops along the way. The Andes are absolutely gorgeous. There's just something really cool about being on the equator and seeing the snow-capped Cayambe mountain right in front of you. We had originally planned on staying at the Hosteria Troje Cotama just north of Otavalo, but when we visited the place we found it a bit too rustic for our tastes so we stayed at the venerable Yamor Continental instead.

The Saturday market in Otavalo is a must-see for any tourist, with its crowds and colors. The reason I like the Otavaleños so much is because they are very prosperous and successful, yet they retain their distinct culture (i.e. dress, language, etc.). And they all seem to know the same English phrases ("My fren, you want buy tapiz? I give you good prise. How about poncho? Es pure wool! I have differente sises and colores. How much you want pay?")

Otavalo is the largest and most tourist-oriented market in the entire country. Yet nobody seems to have change for a five dollar bill? I'll never figure that one out.

We did quite a bit of shopping that day, before Hugo finally returned us to Quito.

When we weren't touring the countryside with Hugo, we were hanging out in Quito. We spent a lot of time visitng the stores, markets and restaurants around our hotel, but we also went to the Mitad del Mundo equator monument one day and we visited Old Quito, with its amazing colonial architecture, on another. Quito has gotten a lot more dangerous in recent years and crime is especially prevalent in the Mariscal Sucre district, where our hotel was located. Luckily, we weren't a victim of any crime (except for the incident where a couple of petty crooks attempted the tired and lame "mustard squirt" scam on me; it failed), but the days of me walking alone around Quito at night (which I did often as a teenager) are over.

Calle Amazonas is my favorite Quito street. It's always busy and bustling and it's fun to sit at an outdoor cafe and watch the world go by. Just make sure that the cafe has a waiter ready to run beggars off at all times. (A word of advice to the street merchants along Calle Amazonas: "no, gracias" means "no thank you, I don't want to buy your poorly-made, overpriced clay pottery and tablecloths." It does not mean "follow me down the street for five or six blocks, begging me to buy your merchandise, and then curse me out when I finally make it clear that I'm not going to buy anything.")

What city has the most number of taxis, per capita? Quito's gotta be up there somewhere.

Cerveza Pilsener is actually decent. Especially when it's 80 cents for a 600 ml bottle. Okay, so maybe some things are still cheaper than in the states. Lori and I also drank a lot of Güitig mineral water. I wish it was available in the States.

Why is it that every time I got to Mexico I manage to get sick, but the last three times I've been in Ecuador I've managed to avoid it? Is the water in Ecuador really that much better than the water in Mexico or something? I doubt it. Maybe I'm just lucky; Atahualpa's Revenge is not any fun. And why do Ecuadoreans think that, just because I am from the United States, I actually have met their cousin Enrique in Boston or their aunt Rosalina in Miami?

Ecuador has internet cafes on every corner and cell phones are commonplace, but they still haven't grasped the concept of touch-tone telephones for their land lines. Nor has Ecuador discovered unleaded gasoline and vehicle emission standards. It's so bad that the toll takers on the highways leading in and out of Quito all wear respirators.

It's been fifteen years since my first visit, and they still don't have well-paved roadways and directional signage along major highways. And why is it that the Policia Nacional can set up a checkpoint every fifteen miles along the Panamerican highway to make sure everybody has a drivers license and to collect bribes from those who don't, but they can't pull over the psychotic bus drivers who pass on blind curves at 90 miles per hour? Some things never change.

Although the cheap fare via LanChile made our trip to Ecuador possible, they screwed us good at the end of our trip. They for made us check one of our carry-on bags because it was "a few pounds too heavy." This despite the fact that the bag was the correct size and would have fit in the overhead bins without a problem (the moron at the ticket counter even told us the bag wouldn't fit in the overhead bin of an A320 when the plane we were flying was actually a 767). After they told us we had to check the bag, we had to wait a good 25 minutes while they prepared the paperwork for it. By the time we finally paid our departure tax, went through immigration, went through security, etc., we barely made our flight. And, once we got onto the plane, we discovered that several other people had been allowed to carry obviously oversized and overweight packages and bags aboard the aircraft. We wrote a letter og complaint to LanChile once we returned to Denton. They responded by sending us a "we're sorry" letter and a cheap plastic calculator/clock that didn't even work! Note to LanChile: it's called CUSTOMER SERVICE. We're not flying you again until you get some.

All in all, Lori and I had a good time in Ecuador. It was interesting to see how some things had changed, while other things had stayed the same. Sadly, the things that needed to have changed the most - the poverty, the lack of basic infrastructure, the corruption, the pollution - are still the same. It's depressing, since the country really doesn't seem to be better off than it was fifteen years ago, when I first visited. On the other hand, the people are still friendly, the countryside is still beautiful, the weather is still wonderful and the food is still good. This was my fifth trip to Ecuador, but it definitely wasn't my last.