Quito and middle earth
February 8th 2023, Quito Even before arriving in Quito, things were starting to look good. When I'm biking, I tend to just ride and when I'm hungry, I stop somewhere that looks vaguely OK and eat whatever is going. Well, rattling along the Panamericana E35 highway...
An election day feast in Ecuador
February 5th 2023, Riobamba. Leaving Guayaquil was a relief, to be honest. I had done next to no biking in the previous 10 days and I was beginning to feel guilty. Yes, I had gone from the city down to the coast and spent two days at a resort named Playas. But that...
At evolution’s Ground Zero, the animals are everywhere
January 29th - February 4th 2023, Galápagos Islands.I know I am in the Galápagos Islands because, when walking from the plane to the terminal building on Baltra Island, there's an iguana asleep in a flowerbed right by the edge of the footpath. At first, I assume it's...
Ecuador — banana plantations and a clean environment
January 23rd 2013, Machala, EcuadorCrossing from Peru into Ecuador proved to be a frustrating experience. When one enters the frontier complex, which is run jointly by both countries, the first building is the Peruvian customs operation. You queue up at a black glass...
Cabo Blanco, an old man and the sea
January 25th 2023, Cabo Blanco. There are a couple of ways out of Paita. One is directly back onto the Panamericana. OK. So we know what that heralds -- a flashy duel carriageway north and out of Peru. The other is a lesser, local road that hugs the coast and...
Cabo Blanco, an old man and the sea
January 25th 2023, Cabo Blanco.There are a couple of ways out of Paita. One is directly back onto the Panamericana. OK. So we know what that heralds -- a flashy duel carriageway north and out of Peru. The other is a lesser, local road that hugs the coast and...
Faded elegance of old whaling port that still lands big catches
January 21st 2023, Paita, Peru. Paita on the north coast of Peru close to the border with Ecuador is a place easily overlooked. Its small enough not to make much of a dent on most maps -- even though it calls itself a city and has a population close to 200,000 -- and...
Casa Real Hotel — quietly classy but with the feel of a family home
December 14th 2022, Buin, near SantiagoOne of the reasons I wanted to visit the Santa Rita vineyard was something their main man in Ireland, Terry Pennington, said to me a while back about climate change, the drought and how the company was trying to mitigate the...
How Chile’s wine producers are trying to address their country’s water problems
January 7th 2023, Valparaiso Jaime de la Barra strokes the leaves on a row of cabernet sauvignon vines with his open palm, in a loving and gentle way, the way he might stroke his daughter's hair. If [the rustle] sounds like paper," he says, "too much water [has been...
Protests erupt again and a high Andes road disappears into tunnels
January 19th 2023, Pacasmayo, northern Peru.I spent a little time today seeking to reassure various people, not least my wife Moira that, whatever they might hear about Peru over the coming days, I was OK, far removed from the likely epicenter and well on my way out...