I got my bags packed on a roll heading out there and I'm ready to go looking real good

in my passport photo.

Oh no!

Amateur Traveler episode 695. Today the Amateur Traveler talks about

colonial cities, indigenous markets and volcanoes, surfing beaches, the Amazon and of course and

the volcanoes, surfing beaches, the Amazon, and of course the Galapagos as we go to Ecuador.

Welcome to the amateur traveler. I'm your host Chris Christensen. Let's talk about

Ecuador. I'd like to welcome to the show Keenan Ennis from greengo travel.com who's come to talk to us about Ecuador.

Keenan welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

So what is your connection with Ecuador? So after

graduating with an ecology degree from my bachelor's at the University of Tennessee. I decided to do an internship and I

found a two-month opportunity in a tropical forest on the coast of Ecuador

called Hamakwake.

And it was completely remote, no electricity,

no refrigerator, it was a huge bamboo house

overlooking a pristine jungle.

You could spot monkeys and birds and it was just an unbelievable experience.

And you stayed.

I think it's really the kind of the punchline here, right? And you stayed, or you went back after you graduated and you've lived in Ecuador for how many years?

So I went back and forth a couple times. I would be traveling during the weekends as we were off.

So on those weekends I went to a couple different surfing towns along the coast. I was doing this internship. Me and another one of the interns, we were in the city of Kanoa and it's like this surfing town. So we were just about to call it at night. I think it must have been probably nine or ten at night and we were pretty tired. But all day long there was this big party going on across the street

...