Today you won’t impress anyone with traveling to distant countries. Except yourself. After just a day in a plane seat, and you find yourself at the other end of the planet: the towering Andes, the Amazon jungle, sulfur of the smoking volcanoes, caves of the Sredinny Range. These are merely words. Words for those who had never been to these places. Can you see beyond what has been caught in the frame? Perhaps you do. If you go there. Or if you imagine. Enable your imagination – this is really worth it. I liked that world. I liked it for how it impressed me.

Since school history textbooks I sincerely believed that cruel conquistadors slaughtered a crowd of Indians and captured their lands since the 16th century. Only one worm of doubt embedded itself quietly in my brain, nibbling on the dogmas, awaiting its finest hour. I had a problem believing that a bunch of Spaniards could single-handedly slaughter entire nations and conquer the population of an entire continent. The worm’s time had come. Everything turned out to be not that simple. It was just this that already made the trip to Ecuador worthwhile.

The territory of modern-day Ecuador was populated by multiple tribes that coexisted more or less. The soil-tilling Quichua lived in the mountains. Meanwhile, the Hourani roamed along the tributaries of the Amazon, hunting and gathering. They would have gone on doing just that, if it had not been for the conquerors. And those were not the Spaniards, and not from the north. The Incas had come. They forced the Quichua back into the Stone Age, reaping plentiful victims. At this point the Spaniards appeared. Bad timing, in the Incas’ opinion. Need I say that the local tribes supported the Spaniards? It was thanks to their support that the empire of Sun worshippers had crumbled. The Incas were exterminated. The Spaniards remained, mixing with the local population. They imported some blacks from Africa. They also added some blood into the mix. This is how they are living to this day, speaking Spanish. Their skin colors range from white to black.

Besides the Galapagos Islands and towering volcanoes, few know about such asset of Ecuador as the proximity of the Amazonian rainforest. In Brazil, for example, it takes weeks of driving to get to the nearest indigenous jungle. In Ecuador, it takes one or two days.