The Devil is in the Details or So I've Been Told

First of all, I'd like to give a shout out to all of you who take the time to read this blog! I've been keeping track of who's checking us out (countries, not IP addresses!) and people from 45 different countries, representing all the continents except the Artic and Antarctic have stopped by to have a look. This is exciting for me for some reason, probably relating to personal vanity. (Fie!)

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Anyhow, it's probably the title that drew you so I'll get on with that. There are many things to consider when making the leap abroad; the classics like feasibility, cultural differences, distance from family, economic changes etc. That paints a pretty wide stripe of things to take in to account. We also asked ourselves what will happen when the government changes, how we would cope trying to learn a new language, what to do when we couldn't get our favourite foods etc. For the most part, we did fairly well in our considerations, but there are a couple of things that just never crossed our minds.

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One of the first things we did was visit our friendly Medical Travel Clinic office and got ourselves lined up for any required inoculations; yellow fever, tetanus, Hep A & B and all those fun things. So what did we forget, your wondering? That nasty little inconvenience known as the common cold. Guess what? The strains down here seem to be different and our immunity is limited. (This is a pet theory of mine, which has yet to be verified, but I cling to it, none the less.) Was there something that we could have done? No, sadly, our immune systems just have to catch up. So this might be a fairly big consideration for you, especially if you have a weakened immune system.

There are other silly little things, like not budgeting for sun screen...it's not that cheap here and if you're being good and using it every day (really a good idea, for the most part, especially when it's sunny) you can go through A LOT.


We also didn't do a study of bus travel times. We knew that Ecuador wasn't a particularly large country, so figure getting around would be simple and efficient (relatively speaking, of course). But if you don't have or can't rent a car, it seems to take forever to get anywhere here. (The mountains might have something to do with that!) Seven hours to the coast, 10 hours to Quito, 5 hours to Guayaquil etc. Even with a car, the travel time isn't that much shorter. This can put a crimp in travel plans, unless you can afford to fly every where.


All these thing haven't chased us away, or made our experiences less enjoyable (well, anymore than a cold affects things) and we're still enjoying ourselves immensely and looking forward to some lengthy bus rides to get to know more of this amazing country. Whatever and wherever you decide to go (or stay) enjoy the ride and take the surprises in stride. (If not, the journey and your enjoyment could be markedly lacking!)

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That's it for now kids, until next time!