If you're reading this now, hopefully you've already read my previous article, "Adventures in the Galapagos Islands Part One," which gives some background on our trip and documents our experiences with the wildlife and environment. If not, be sure to check it out! I'm going to go ahead and jump into Part Two now:

1. We ate your pet’s cousin.

To be fair, not everyone tried the guinea pig. But come on, it is kind of a “when in Rome” type of thing, and besides, it tasted like chicken!

However, Ecuadorean cuisine does include many other appealing options, if guinea pig just doesn’t suit your taste. Everything tastes so fresh, unprocessed and authentic. For instance, one of their signature dishes is locro, a steaming bowl of thick (but not too thick) potato soup with cheese and a slice of an avocado. (If you’re picky like me, you can remove the avocado.) While it’s mouthwatering on its own, there’s a twist: they put popcorn in it. It’s a bit of a strange concept at first, but totally worth the initial weirdness of watching the white puffs submerge into the soup.

They always had a new fruit juice combination for us to try, made up of guava or pineapple or fruits we weren’t even familiar with. Trying their freshly squeezed orange juice made you never want to drink Tropicana again, and their coffee was too delicious to pass up. Besides that, the chocolate is absolutely to die for. And a combination of chocolate with coffee nibs interspersed throughout? Heavenly.

2. Brushing up on our Spanish.

Honestly, we didn’t speak a ton of Spanish while we were there. All of our tour guides spoke English remarkably well, as did the majority of the locals we encountered. We did become accustomed to saying “Gracias” a lot, which was a bit of a hard habit to break once we were back in the States.

The most practice we got with Spanish was when we spent a few hours at a market in Otavalo, Ecuador, called Plaza de Los Ponchos. There, the native people sell a plethora of all kinds of handmade items: woven bracelets, alpaca sweaters, dolls, belts, silver jewelry, paintings, dream catchers, patterned pants – the list continues. The market was an overwhelming maze of colorful stalls crammed tightly together, with all of the workers constantly vying for your attention. They were friendly enough, but somewhat insistent. When we did want to buy something, we bartered: using our broken Spanish to bring the price lower and lower. Some of us (not me) were successful in buying items for half of their original value!

One of the most interesting parts of this excursion was being able to be even more immersed in the native lifestyle. Kendall McAlister said, “Learning about the culture had the biggest impact on me.” I couldn’t agree more. It was eye-opening to have this window into people’s lives, seeing them in their native dress and speaking their native tongue as they proudly displayed their wares.

3. Bonding through the bumpy times (like boat rides).

While this was an incredible experience, as Bradley Holeman noted, “It was exhausting.” Traveling wears you out, especially when you’re constantly on-the-go during the day and staying in a different place each night. Needless to say, we experienced our fair share of rough patches, like when we thought our group might not make it to the top of the volcano. (As Macy pointed out, it “was not lung-friendly.”)

We bonded over missing the comforts of home, especially when most of the public restrooms did not have toilet paper or we had to choose between eating either fish or chicken for the fifteenth time. Mrs. Karen McAlister said, “This trip made me appreciate everything I have. I realized how spoiled we are to have things like ice and toilet paper.”

Far beyond our own struggles, our hearts hurt a little bit every time we saw another stray dog, especially if its ribs were poking out or it had mange. And that didn’t even begin to compare to how it felt to see a tiny elderly person huddled in a doorway, hoping against hope that some of the passerby would spare him or her a few coins. Ecuador is beautiful, and a lot of it is good. But there are parts of it and people in it hurting, just like in the States.

You can’t help but be closer after going through all of these things together, and I believe that was one of the most remarkable outcomes of this adventure. We experienced a wide range of aspects of the culture, and we grew personally and as a group because of it.

I think Ms. Schelice Reyes said it best: “My favorite thing about this trip was spending it with all of you.”

For the group members reading this: Don’t think that I forgot! I know it stinks that we couldn’t actually drink tea at our debriefing sessions, but at least we had stimulating conversation topics, like beluga whales and orthodontics. Thank you: a) for controlling yourselves and not doing handstands during group meetings, and b) for making this a memorable trip of a lifetime! I absolutely loved adventuring with each of you! Y’all rock.