What do you do if you have three hours to kill in a tiny airport, it is 32°c and the only thing in the airport – a very small café – is closed?  You write a blog.

I am on my way back from a great weekend on the coast.  I came down here to see the guys who are leaving on Thursday – they are the core of our first group and they are coming to the end of their three months.  Somewhat like their arrival, this feels like a really big event: a big mark in the life of Camp Ecuador.

The Equator monument near Camp Maqui

Camp Costa looks great and the weather has been fabulous.  Today some of the group were diving and the rest were visiting Isla de la Plata.  Project work is done and holiday time is here, and there could hardly be a better place for a few days chilling out.

The group have, since arriving; cared for abandoned animals; built an organic vegetable garden, which will feed the kids at Santa Marianita school for years to come; maintained paths in the cloud forest, to help in the conservation of the spectacled bear; painted the tables at Camp Maqui to leave their mark; built a river beach for yellow-spotted turtle nesting; helped in the construction of a community tourism scheme; ridden a llama; taught English; learnt Spanish; built octopus houses out of recycled materials; visited the Andes, the Amazon and the coast (and some of them fitted in the Galapagos as well); spent lots of money in Otavalo; stood on the equator; been tubing and ziplining; seen butterflies hatch and chocolate being made; visited Quito old town, the best preserved of the early colonial cities in Latin America; spent time in indigenous communities; walked to 4800 meters on one of the world’s highest active volcanoes; travelled many miles by road, air and both river and ocean going boat; laughed and cried and probably argued, but I don’t know about the last one: not a bad way to spend a few months away from the drought in the UK.

Working at the aquarium while at Camp Costa

A permanent reminder of the first group at Camp Maqui

Pre ascent to Refuge on Cotopaxi at 4800 meters, and subsequent descent by mountainbike.

They are now going on to various universities and careers and we wish them well.  It has been a great pleasure having them here and maybe one day they’ll come back and see us.  For us it is time to push on, to build on the good work that the first group has been so important in helping establish and make sure we do this great country justice for those who follow.

If you go to Otavalo market on a weekday it is impressive.  You think about the fact that you have been told it is the largest arts and crafts market in South America and you come away satisfied. Then you go on a Saturday.  The noise, the colour, the crush, the sheer overwhelming abundance of life is senses shattering.  I would guess that it is eight or ten times the size of its weekday self.  I have changed the schedules of all our trips: Otavalo on a Saturday, put it in your list of things to do before you die.

The Amazon basin is vast, truly eye bogglingly vast.  There is a pull-in on the road from Papallacta down into the “Oriente”, as it is called in Ecuador, from which you can look out east across miles upon miles of green.  It is the sort of view in which you have to think in terms of the curve of the earth rather than simply the horizon.  It inspires you to think about the few “lost tribes” who get on with their lives out there without broadband, Coca-Cola and, for the most part, metal and the wheel.  Globally significant and hard to take in.

There are quite a few live volcanoes in Ecuador: Tungurahua erupted in 2010.  These mountains form, in most cases, perfect cones, like children’s drawings of mountains.  Many are snow capped.  Tungurahua still smokes occasionally.  You can climb Cotapaxi, but when you are on it you may want to remember that this mountain, in 1877 – about 3 seconds ago in geological time – managed to spew lahars (mudflows) during one of its eruptions as far as the Pacific coast, which is about 100kms away.    In Ecuador the ground itself is animate.

Machalilla National Park on the Ecuador coast, and site of Camp Ecuador’s Costa Camp, has been described as the love shack of the humpback whale.  No one knows for certain why they breach –  show of strength, mating ritual, extreme breathing technique, getting rid of parasites are all considered possible – but when they do you can see the splash from many miles away.  And, particularly in June/July/August, you are likely to be much, much closer than that: it is hard to avoid the clichés of ‘majestic’ , ‘powerful’  (‘awesome’ if you are an American) except to say it is sort of dribblingly staggering and life affirming

One for the boys:  Dolores, who cleans our house, calls me “Don Damian”.  Come on now, admit it, “Don”: you understand.

Damian Scott-Mason Director Camp Ecuador

It is time – is it perhaps overdue? – that Latin America made its presence known in the Camps blogging world.  We will not be able to compete with Dipesh or Anth for sheer quantity for the time being; but we are coming.

One of the best things about travelling is that, no matter how much preparation you have done and how much you feel you are ready, life, the country you are visiting and the people in it have their own ideas about what should happen.  Ecuador, in the first week or so, has been everything we expected it to be.  It has also been so much more, and it has thrown at us things that I could have spent twenty years trying to anticipate and would not have considered.

Latin America is a fantastically diverse place, but it also has a flavour that crosses its borders and is just Latin.  I would not presume to know how to summarise it, but it is something, in my mind, along the lines of being faintly familiar to a European, in the way that perhaps Cambodia is not, at the same time as being utterly surprising and so indefinably itself.  You probably need to come here to understand what I am saying, which is of course the point.

In the last eight days much has happened.  You need to be aware when doing things like this that you are creating memories, and I was absolutely aware of that when I was chasing a pick-up through Quito with my wife and children in it and some mattresses on the back of it that we had just bought. It is difficult trying to drive in Quito; it is very difficult when you are trying to keep up with a loco Quitenos delivery driver in a hurry, in rush hour.  It becomes even more difficult when a storm comes out of nowhere, and we are here talking about a proper mountain downpour, on to our new mattresses, on the back of the open pick-up; and roads turn into rivers.  Then said loco Quitenos runs a red light, I am cut up by four or five taxis, I nearly run over a stray dog, the hire car won’t go into second gear, my family don’t have a phone and they and the driver have no idea where they are going.  Not a normal day in Dorset, but fun.  The weather caught me out again the next day: when I lit the BBQ I was worried about getting sunburn, ten minutes later, the fire, such as it was, was being put out by mallet sized rain drops – we ate pasta instead.

Another memory that will linger long is lying in a dentist’s chair – two emergency dental procedures required within 24 hours of arrival, just don’t ask – seeing the planes come into land at Mariscal Sucre airport.  And when I say seeing the planes, I mean looking horizontally across at them as they sweep along their final descent almost literally through this city- surrounded-by-mountains, being able to see the colour of the captain’s eyes.

And on it goes, the Garmin Sat Nav has an English setting, the voice of which has the name Emily for some reason, but poor old Emily hasn’t been informed of the one-way system in Quito, which unfortunately led to an early meeting with the Ecuadorian constabulary; one of whom at least, I found out, is interested in quick cash settlement of driving penalties.

If you want to buy crockery in Quito you need to click into the particular logic of the retailers.  You’ll find the crockery, sorry, some of the crockery, near the furniture, the rest of it, sorry, some of the rest of it, is near the lawn mowers, there’s some more near the motorbikes, a little near the drumkits and the rest is behind the children’s clothing.  Oh sorry, there is also some upstairs by the wine and the majority of it is in fact hiding up there close to the diesel generators and lingerie.  And this is in a shop no bigger than two tennis courts.

I won’t bother with telling you about the banks, it makes me weep.

All of this makes being here utterly fantastic.  I am reminded every minute that I am not at home, and why oh why would I want to be here if it was like home – I’d just be at home.  I can see a 6,000 meter peak from my bedroom window and hummingbirds skit passed the kitchen window.  The loud, loud music in the taxies is going to take some getting used to, I am falling in love with the strange hybrid which is the mix of the sweet smell of donuts cooking and the stench of diesel fumes, and the speed at which everyone speaks is astonishing and makes communication endlessly interesting: you try buying a second hand car from a man who says amortiguardores delant y poster esta bien in less than 0.001 of a second – exactly.