4 Reasons not to come to Ecuador

I love living in Ecuador. Despite being one of the smallest countries in South America, it is absolutely packed with biodiversity, hospitable people and boundless opportunities for adventure.

However, having lived here for a year and a bit, there are some things about this place that drive me crazy.

1. Insecurity 

I arrived in Quito, Ecuador the same day that presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated at a campaign rally in the same city.

I had already put my guard up a bit before leaving the UK since a couple of cyclists in our shared ‘Riding the America’s’ WhatsApp group had reported being kidnapped, robbed and sexually abused at their lakeside campsite near Otavalo. 

I arrived at my new teaching job a little later. My new colleagues were quick to inculcate me with horror stories and advised me not to walk the streets. I supposedly needed to take an Uber everywhere or I would surely be robbed and killed immediately.

Back in the UK I don’t drive. I don’t really think twice about lacing up and going for a walk at any time of the day or night. Getting outdoors and moving around freely is my primary method of maintaining a positive mental attitude. If something needs doing, and I have the time to kill, I will always opt to carry out my errands around town on foot. After a heavy night out in the pub I’m happy to walk myself home, for hours if need be. It’s just a really wholesome way for me to be kind to myself and it’s certainly never made me feel worse.

Being trapped inside one kind of box or another while living in Quito has really had an impact on my quality of life. 

I’m lucky that I live near one of the best parks in Quito, Parque Metropolitano. It’s hilly, forested and with plenty of technical trails, making for a great bit of mountain biking after work. The very first day that I visited I encountered a distressed couple, warning me that they had just been robbed at gunpoint on the trail. This is not conducive to carefree park experience.

A motorcyclist robbed a car on my street about a month after my arrival. A bystanding driver witnessed the robbery and rammed the bike in a spontaneous act of vigilante justice, killing the rider. 

Whenever I walk to my classes, I always make sure to keep to the side of the road that’s facing oncoming traffic, and never have my phone visible in my hand. 

I opened a second bank account, into which I transfer most of my monthly earnings, and then make sure to never take that card out of the apartment. I made a laminated photocopy of my Ecuadorian identity card, because it is an absolute pain in the arse to apply for a new one if the original gets nicked. 

Go and ask a room full of Ecuadorians to raise their hands if they have ever been robbed. So far in my experience the result has always been unanimous. 

Ecuador made international headlines back in January 2024, when masked men invaded a live television broadcast in Guayaquil, and held the staff hostage at gunpoint.

In our teacher’s office we were all dumbstruck; No one had ever seen anything so brazen carried out so publicly. Our boss sent us all home, advising us to stock up on food. 

An 11pm to 5am curfew was announced. School was closed, we returned to Covid-era Zoom lessons. 

President Novoa had declared a state of war against organised crime groups in the country. 

Gangs here had long dominated the prisons; Their sicarios were always significantly better armed than their guards, who were often in their pay anyway. 

Now the government had resolved to clean the bastards out by force. 

All hell broke loose. 

The streets of the strategic drug smuggling coastal cities of Guayaquil, Manta and Esmeraldas raged with violence. 

Quito isn’t really considered a cartel stronghold, but nevertheless we had several bombs go off nearby prisons in protest. I happen to live within a kilometer of Carcel Inca, and was in the middle of teaching a Zoom class when the police carried out a controlled detonation of a gasoline bomb that they had discovered next to the prison.

We all got used to hearing exchanges of gunfire around the city. A couple of gunshots rang out nearby while I was buying groceries and the shopkeeper casually remarked that someone had just got wasted, and then carried on bagging up the fruit that I had just bought.

Currently there is a chronic shortage of public prosecutors in this country. Despite extensive efforts to maintain anonymity, it turns out that taking on cartel members in a courtroom is a really good way of getting yourself un-alived. I have a huge amount of respect for these people who turn up to work everyday to fight for justice, despite having the deck stacked so heavily against them.

Just fifteen years ago Ecuador was considered one of the safest countries in Latin America. By contrast the current state of affairs is considered a national disgrace by the citizens of this beautiful country. 

2. Government shenanigans and mismanagement 

In April 2024 the Novoa government decided to forcibly snatch a political rival, former Vice-President Jorje Glas, from his refuge in the Mexican embassy. For all intents and purposes they had invaded the sovereign territory of Mexico, assaulting the Mexican security personnel in the process. This was a clear violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961. Consequently, Mexico severed all diplomatic relations with Ecuador, and petitioned the United Nations for Ecuador to have its membership suspended. Venezuela closed its diplomatic mission in Quito in solidarity with Mexico. 

There is a huge Venezuelan expat population in Ecuador, including my Spanish teacher, Berxi, and several colleagues at my school. All of them were trying their hardest to support their families back home in some form or other. Suddenly, the nearest Venezuelan consulate was now in Colombia, instead of Quito. Absolutely ridiculous.

In response to the state of conflict against the gangs, Novoa called for a referendum, asking citizens to vote on a range of motions, such as giving emergency powers to the military, enabling them to operate in a law enforcement role. Novoa declared a ‘state of deception’ (I don’t think I’ve done a good job of translating that) on the days running up to the referendum. Novoa accused unnamed government actors of attempting to carry out political sabotage. The country was shut down on the days leading up to the vote. School was closed, again. 

The previous (Correa) government decided that building hydroelectric plants would allow the exportation of energy overseas as a carbon offset program. Potentially rather lucrative.

They brought in a Chinese company to construct the dams. No one bothered to carry out a proper environmental assessment of viability beforehand. The result? At the best of times the plants were only functioning at a fraction of the predicted output. 

And these were not the best of times. In the summer of 2024 we had two months of drought. The reservoirs rapidly emptied. It turned out that essentially maintenance, such as dredging, had not been carried out. Rather than selling their energy overseas, Ecuador wound up begging for it from Colombia, which worked for a little while, until they also found themselves in the same fix and had to stop their exports. 

During the drought we experienced ‘wildfires’ all over the city. CCTV caught arsonists deliberately starting them, although the motive was not immediately clear, giving rise to conspiracy theories. Some believed that they were an act of political sabotage by the opposition party, paying people to commit arson as a form of protest. I was also told that some people hold the belief that smoke stimulates rainfall, and that the fires might have been started as an attempt to alleviate the drought. I really hope this wasn’t the reason behind tens of millions of dollars worth of destruction over the last few years, but I won’t rule it out. 

We had a fire in Quito that led to a huge smoke plume covering the main city centre. The school had to be closed once again. People needed to be evacuated from their homes to avoid smoke inhalation. 

Annoyingly, the next day the rains started. So if anyone thought they were solving the drought by setting things on fire had their superstitions confirmed…

While the rains had now started around Quito, the reservoirs feeding the hydroelectric plants continued to deplete. Scheduled power cuts reached as much as 16 hours a day. Several neighbourhoods even had their drinking water supply cut off for hours at a time. 

Making a living in the post-Covid world often leans heavily on access to electricity and the internet. These people were heavily impacted. Several of my colleagues were trying to study university degrees virtually. This was an absolute nightmare for them.

Most diesel generators are never designed to be more than a backup power supply, meant to fill the gaps during temporary power outages. After months of prolonged use they began to break down. Sediment needed to be cleared from reservoirs to increase capacity. Fossil fuel power stations needed to be recommissioned.

It took until December for things to more or less get back to normal.

In the West it feels like we are constantly struggling with incompetence, dishonesty and stupidity in our governments, however it could definitely be a whole lot worse.

I’ve often wondered how Latinos can be so outwardly positive. My colleague, José, from Venezuela explained to me that if I had lived on this continent through the times that he had, and seen these sorts of things happen over and over again, I would have discovered that the only way that you can keep yourself from despair is to force a smile and just keep moving.

As I write this we are coming up to the national elections on the 9th of February. Given the experiences that I’ve had so far I’m sure that something stupid is going to happen. Ecuador has an annoying law where you can’t buy alcohol on the last few days before an election. So you can’t even go to the pub to numb the pain…

If you are interested in learning more about how Ecuador ended up the way that it is, I highly recommend reading about the presidency of Rafael Correa. I decided not to touch on the subject, since there is far too much to talk about and he would need a whole article just to himself. He is a highly divisive figure who certainly made his mark on the country. ‘Correistas’, as his followers are known, are very much still active and will likely be the main competition to the current administration in the upcoming 2025 elections.

3. Public behaviour

Ecuadorians are really hospitable. If I was limited to picking a single advantage to living in this part of the world, it would have to be the people. 

But public behaviour out on the streets of Quito? It’s a real headache. 

In many parts of the world, it’s considered normal practice to let other people get off the bus or train before trying to get on board yourself. In Quito it’s just a free for all. Two groups of humanity with conflicting intentions trying to pass through the same doorway. Would it be so hard for you to just wait 2 seconds?!

A similar example occurs when you are walking towards another person, but your path narrows due to some kind of obstacle, so that it can only admit one person at a given moment. In well over a year of living here I’ve never once had the other party stop to allow me to pass. Whenever I have stopped to allow them to come through I have never received any kind of acknowledgement for making their life a little bit easier.

The driving really gives away that Ecuador is a third world country. For a start, everyone is using their phones constantly. The bus driver, the police, everyone. 

The moment that traffic lights turn green, someone usually taps their horn to let everyone else in the line know that they need to look up from their phone and get into gear.

As a pedestrian I’ve almost been nailed several times because drivers don’t necessarily look in both directions before they pull out. I typically avoid cycling in traffic unless it’s absolutely necessary, preferring to stick to ‘ciclopaseos’ and mountain bike trails.

People park up on the pavement (sidewalk, Americans) adjacent to whatever shop they want to visit, step out of their car and then just leave their door wide open, taking up the entirety of the available space for pedestrians. Unless you step out into the traffic there is nowhere to go. I once lost my temper and just slammed the door closed and kept walking, learning a new swear word in Spanish in the process. 

The way that Quiteños deal with being on the receiving end of motorized stupidity is incredibly stoic; drivers rarely bat an eyelid in the face of even the most boneheaded of maneuvers, which would send the average western driver flying into a fit of rage and keep them chuntering about it for the rest of the day. Not allowing a bad 10 seconds to ruin the rest of your day is perhaps something we can learn from this country. 

My experiences with these types of behaviour are specific to Quito, and don’t necessarily apply to the whole country.

4. International products are very expensive 

Import duties. Anything foreign is stupidly expensive. I’ve recently gotten used to playing around with all the fancy lightweight backpacking and bikepacking equipment that is popular in the west. However, getting hold of those sorts of things here in Ecuador is back-breakingly expensive. 

Electronics, cars, musical instruments, and anything else manufactured abroad are all prohibitively expensive. At least twice the price of what you would find them for in the USA. Since the average wage in Ecuador is around 500 dollars a month, I’m amazed that anyone can afford to drive here, let alone possess a phone in order to distract themselves while doing so. 

This has created a lucrative market for ‘informal’ courier services. There is a very popular group on Facebook called ‘Ecuador mules’, where expats pay a decent chunk of cash for travellers to bring over their favourite brand of chocolate etc. when they fly home.

Last summer I got approached by a bloke in Guayaquil Airport, who explained how he ran his own small business of ‘mules’. Basically, if I ever decided to fly home for a spell I could book flights through him and he would cover the expense, in exchange for bringing a suitcase back. Sounds like a nice little arrangement really, except that I would never be able to fully guarantee that one of those innocent-looking packages didn’t contain something that would lead to a more in-depth study of the Ecuadorian prison system.

Whenever I fly home to visit my family, I usually end up with a long list of items to bring back for my friends in Ecuador. European football shirts seem to be very popular. British chocolates are another. I wonder if there is enough of a market there for a cheeky side hustle?

Despite all of the issues that I’ve discussed above, I’ve had a really great time here. I would still absolutely recommend anyone to come and experience the wonders of this country. 

This entry is a counterpart to 4 reasons you must come to Ecuador.