Paperwork, Mountains & Miradors

July 5, 2014

From Popyan we made the wild and beautiful drive into Ecuador. The road was cut into steep green hillsides that reveals something new at every turn. We were headed to Ibarra where we got wind the owner of a campground there could help us with long term storage of our beloved Dolores. Work had contacted Rachel to see if she could help out while a colleague was out on maternity leave. We would be headed back to the states for 3 months and needed to work through the logistics of leaving a car in a foreign country.

Turns out, most governments, don’t like this idea one bit so it takes jumping through hoops and ultimately figuring out which country has the least efficient way of tracking you with your car (i.e. your vehicle permit isn’t indicated in your passport). For us Ecuador was this country. But that wasn’t all. To legally leave the car, without explaining that we were leaving the car we had to get paperwork showing that car could be there past the typical 90 day limit that we would inevitably exceed traveling home and back. This meant that George was going to have to get a special visa that allowed him to stay in the country for 6 months (it’s the only time extension option) and then we’d have to get paperwork for the car that matched that amount of time. Why go through all this hassle? If our paperwork wasn’t in perfect order, the Ecuadoran government has the right to take Dolores from us and never give her back.

If you’re interested in the gory details of this process, click here. In brevity it takes about a week and you run from government office to government office to stand in line. Once you file for the visa you have to wait four days before you can do anything else so we took this time to explore the central part of Ecuador.

We drove the Quilatoa Loop. Amazing landscapes, checkered hillsides, and fields of flowers – it was like taking a drive back in time.

From there we motored to Cotopaxi where we met this awesome guy Remy from France, drove Dolores to 14k feet, hiked to the Refuigo, and George and Remy climbed Ruminahi.

We ventured to the Papallteca Termas and soaked in the warm water and drove to miradors that were so unimpressive that George got upset.

We explored Quito.

At the Equator we played along with all the fun gravity games.

After the painful process getting our paperwork in order was complete we had to book it back to Ibarra where we would prep Dolores for 3 sunny months without us. But time was of the essence – our flight back to the states was only 3 days away.