Crunched for time to catch up with blogging, ride reports and facebook, I am only posting an overview of Ecuador, but it barely does it justice the week I spent there. It is a beautiful country, with great roads, almost all of which were recently paved.
I kept wondering if I was going to run into trouble trying to cross the border on New Years Eve. I did, but it was not at the customs office as I had originally thought. I ran into it (almost literally) on the road. I thought is was just an excuse for guys to dress up in drag and festively dance in the middle of the street, but there was more purpose than that. They held up ropes in the middle of the street to stop traffic and ask for money for explosives to ignite the new year. They stuffed paper mache dolls (called ano Viejo – the old year) and set them to fire at midnight. I loved this idea of burning the old.
