I have spent considerable time on an Ecuadorian forum getting educated on Ecuador and the conditions I will find there so I can prepare properly for the trip. I have received great input for this forum and obtained an education and many tips of how to best approach this trip as well as information on how to prepare to live there if I choose this route.
My main reason for this trip is to scout the country with the idea to retire there and hopefully obtain a better quality of life with my fixed income due to the lower cost of living. This forum is great and very active and the expats in Ecuador are very happy to offer information on their daily lives there and the experiences they've had. Also they have shared the cost of many items and services as well as living conditions in different cities or towns there.
The link to this forum is: http://www.expatexchange.com/expat/index.cfm?frmid=202&forumid=0&dbname=ee&shared=N and I strongly recommended for anyone wanting to contact expats and/or future expats to Ecuador as well as learning about living there and posting your questions. There is a frequent poster that goes by the name of "Carolannemck" that owns a hotel in Otavalo who is very honest and knowledgeable of the country and will give you the thruthful answer without any personal spin no matter wether is good or bad. You can see her hotel web page and personal contact at: http://www.trojecotama.com where she has posted some pictures.
In this forum I have made personal contacts with some expats in different cities I will be visiting and I'm looking forward to meet them and share information on their experiences as well as reasons to be there and other personal questions.
The way I got interested in Ecuador was reading an article in a magazine called International Living (you can Google them if interested) but I do not recommend you believe most of their information because its mostly biased to get you to go whatever country they are advertising and take one of their trips to visit Real Estate they are promoting in that particular country.
I will be leaving for Ecuador December 16th and fly directly to Guayaquil on a new Ecuadorian airlines called Aerogal. Then I plan to inspect the coastal area from the city of Salinas all the way north up tp San Vicente. Then I plan to fly to the highlands and visit Cuenca, Quito, Lojas Otavalo and Vilcabamba. All these cities/towns are in the Andes mountains and some are quite high such as Quito which is around 8,000 feet high. They claim the weather there is eternal spring being around 75 deg F during the day (when the sun is out) and goes as low as in the 5o's at night and early mornings. The coast is the other way around. Its in the 80's during the day and sometimes goes slight ly lower at nights but is humid and has some mosquitoes.
My first experience has been that the high end hotels like the Hilton are more expensive in Ecuador than in the US. Also Internet speed is not very high the most I have heard up tp now is 128KB. And hotels even in the smaller towns are also high even though you would expect them to be much lower being a third world country where the average Mo. salary is around $300/month.
