Ecuador: Four Worlds in One Country and the Galapagos at the Edge
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Ecuador contains four entirely distinct worlds within a country smaller than Nevada. The Costa — the Pacific lowlands — is tropical, humid, and home to most of the population. The Sierra — the Andes highlands — contains indigenous communities, colonial cities, and volcanoes; Chimborazo, measured from the centre of the earth, is the farthest point from earth's core on the planet's surface, making it technically taller than Everest. The Oriente — the Amazon basin — contains some of the most biodiverse rainforest on earth. And 1,000 kilometres offshore, the Galápagos Islands sit on the equator in the Pacific.
Ecuador is the world's largest exporter of roses — not a product people automatically associate with a South American country. The combination of equatorial light, altitude, and temperature range in the highlands creates growing conditions for roses that produce stems dramatically larger and blooms dramatically longer-lived than what can be grown in Europe or North America. On Valentine's Day, a significant percentage of the roses sold across the world came from Ecuadorian greenhouses.
The Galápagos Islands are what made Darwin understand evolution. The isolation of each island allowed the same ancestral species to diverge into forms adapted to different environments — finches with different beaks, tortoises with different shell shapes, iguanas that learned to swim. The animals have no fear of humans because they evolved in the absence of mammalian predators. Visitors walk among blue-footed boobies, marine iguanas, and giant tortoises that simply continue doing what they were doing. The indifference of the wildlife is the most disorienting thing about the islands.
