Final thoughts on our Ecuador/Peru trip

I am going to use this to share some final thoughts and things we learned on our trip.  In no particular order..

First some practical info about the ecuador and peru bathroom experience.

•  Oddly the toilet often had no seat (yes even the women's restroom).  I assume you are supposed to hover but I really didn't understand.  This happened even in some nicer tourist places and airports
• Always have toilet paper on you!  It was a 50/50 chance that any given bathroom would have toilet paper available.
• Many places have pay bathrooms (often around 50 cents for entry including a few squares of toilet paper)
• You should basically never put your tp in the toilet.  Their sewer system seems to not be able to handle that
• We never drank the water unless it was boiled or treated.  I did brush my teeth with it and never got sick
• The inca trail bathrooms are grosser than outhouses

The inca trail bathroom experience

Other random thoughts on our travel and practical tips if you are thinking about going to ecuador or peru

• Always have small change.  People will often refuse your money if you don't have something close to the right amount of money.
• Cash is king.  Even if places claim to take credit cards online they often don't when it is time to pay
• Use scotiabank ATMs in Peru.  These atms never charged us a fee while other ones seemed to say we would be charged $5 per transaction
• Have lots of space to bring back things.  There are so many amazing textiles and other things that are so cheap.  For example we got this beautiful 6 foot hand made wall hanging for around $50 and that was the most expensive thing we got.
• Ecuador uses the dollar but mints only coins.  They accept all american money but their coins won't work here.  In Peru they use the Sole but most tourist places accept dollars and atms dispense soles and dollars
• The private tours or small tours are worth it and usually pretty cheap.  For small group 10 hour tours is was often around $40-50 a person.  If you speak better spanish the transportation system might be more managable but otherwise it is hard to get around
• Nearly everyplace even big cities have a strange mix of private transportation.  They are private bus companies that compete on routes so there is no overall system map or good way to understand what is going on if you don't speak spanish.  There is the metropolitan in Peru but that is seemingly always backed to the point that having enough room to breath might be an issue.
• Taxis are cheap (like $2-5 for up to an hour trip) and we didn't get ripped off once (although we always had the hotel or tourist place call a cab if possible)
• South American beer is generally on the level of Bud light and it is hard to get anything better.  It is however generally cheap and drinkable they way that Grain Belt is drinkable.  There seems to be a few brew pubs and microbrews in larger cities but you have to find them and they are not available in grocery stores.
• There is more culture things then you might imagine.  Lima and Quito have lots of spanish places that are around 500 years old plus there are tons of things from older civilizations to see.
• You can get around not knowing spanish but studying basic spanish even for a month was quite helpful since sometimes you run into a smaller place where nobody speaks english
• They love KFC.  Other american chains were available but KFC was everywhere.  Street food was generally less than half the cost and much better.
• Despite having so much fresh food they eat mostly meat and potatoes.  Veggies seem to be a garnish, although you could find places where this was not true.
• Coffee was generally very bad.  Nescafe is all over the place or the Cusco version which is only slightly better.  There are some newer coffee shops that actually serve some of the good coffee they grow there.  Starbucks is only a few places in Peru and it was generally worse than the US
• Don't bring too many clothes.  Laundry is $1/kg to wash dry iron and fold with service in about 8 hours or less.  Don't give them any clothes you can't part with.  We lost a few socks and gained somebody's speedo.  There seemed to be no self service laundry places.
• $30-40/night generally gets you a decent place to stay with breakfast.  It won't be the Hyatt but it will mostly be clean, nicely located and comfortable if you do your research.
• Internet speeds vary widely.  Generally every place we staying in Ecuador had ok internet, but Peru even in big cities the internet could be really slow.  Not sure if that is just where we stayed or a trend.
• If you have TMobile you get free texting and 3G or slower data.  Calls are 20 cents/minute but they don't seem to have charged us for our short calls.
• In Peru if you are using dollars to pay make sure they are new without any rips.  Even strange folds can get them rejected by vendors.
• Flights are cheap especially in Ecuador ($60 round trip for a 1 hour flight).  
• Buses are cheap especially in Ecuador.  Buses in Peru are better though but cost more for the best companies)
• They let you bring most things on the flight for domestic flights, but international flights security is possibly even tighter than in the US.

That is all I can think of for now.  If you are thinking about doing your own trip feel free to contact me and ask questions.  Overall we loved our trip!  It was relatively cheap (about 10k for absolutely everything for 2 people 32 days with the inca trail and rainforest being about 3k total).  We saw such a variety of things we didn't get homesick even after a month.  There are lots of culture and outdoor things to do in both countries.

I will go back and update other days as I get a chance.  I am also already thinking about our next trip.  In Jan I will be going to Mexico, or San Diego or Africa or some combo of those things.  We are hoping to do another big trip next summer probably in July this time so St. Kate's is happier.  Current options are the Balkans, SE Asia or Spain/northern africa.  We are looking for someplace relatively inexpensive that we haven't been too that we should do before having kids.  If anybody has ideas let me know. Thanks for reading!