The photos and videos I’ve posted on Flickr capture some of the experience, and while the trip held too much adventure to describe here in great detail, I’ll hit some of the highlights below.  (You can also go back and read individual posts written during the trip.)

Our trip was a nice combination of planned itinerary (primarily, the week-long stay on the boat M/Y Eric to tour around the Galapagos) and “wander around once we get there” mode.  The Lonely Planet Guide to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands provide indispensable for the whole experience, from helping with food to lodging to cultural experiences and everything in between.  We were also visiting in advance of the heavier tourist season, so we were able to get into most any experience without advance reservation.

In the cloud forests of Mindo, to the northwest of Quito, we were so impressed by our stay at El Monte, a jungle lodge where we had a cabana for two nights.   Between the beautiful spot we had right on the rushing Mindo river, the amazing home-cooked meals three times a day, the beautiful main open-air lodge, and the warm and friendly staff, we were in paradise (mosquitoes notwithstanding).  We also had a chance to meet and dine with travelers from around the world, some of them on multi-month trips – it was quite fun (and okay, sometimes exhausting) to discuss politics, religion and economics with such a wide variety of global perspectives.  El Monte was created and is run by Tom and Mariella, who have worked hard to create an experienced powered by renewable resources (mostly hydro and solar) and supported by an amazing staff of cooks, guides, and hospitality coordinators.  We felt like we were among friends and well taken care of.

Our time in the Galapagos Islands was phenomenal.  The main theme of the encounters with the land and the animals of the islands is that they don’t know any fear of humans, and so it is possible to walk right up to a sea lion, a blue footed boobie bird or an iguana and look them in the eye. And that we did, day after day.  We sunned on the beach with the magnificent families of sea lions, and then joined them in the water when it got too hot. We snorkeled around amazing coral reef with penguins, sting rays, sharks and the most beautiful varieties of fish. We hiked through lava rock formations to see iguana resting and watching, huge bright red crabs sunning, waved albatross nesting, and great blue heron quietly stalking. Pelicans swooped by just inches away, and finches (all 13 varieties) showed us their nests. We watched in awe of the giant tortoises that had been alive longer than Kelly and I combined, slowly moving around their home in search of the best grass, the coolest pond.

After the Galapagos, we headed south into the Andes mountains for the city of Banos, where we originally intended to stay just a night or two, and ended up soaking it in for five days.  Banos seems to be the Ecuadorian equivalent of Boulder, Colorado – an outdoorsy person’s Mecca buried in the mountains, with myriad activities you can take on to pass the time.  Every block offers touring companies that will take you rafting, kayaking, canyoning, jungle tripping, go-carting, mountain biking and more.  There are trails extending up to the volcano and surrounding volcanic formations that range from steep to “are you kidding me?”   The best part is that once you’re done with your outdoor adventure, this place knows how to help you relax.  There are natural baths with water heated by the volcano, massage and spa companies on every block (most professional, some not), and so many different restaurants representing cuisine from around the world, it can take an hour to decide what to eat.  I think we found a good balance of high adventure (the most intense Class IV+ whitewater rafting either of us have ever done) followed by relaxation (ask me about the spa experience sometime).

Adjusting to different forms of transportation was a source of constant excitement on this trip.  As is apparently the case with much of South America, the experience of taking a bus between cities is very common, and can be very harrowing (especially for the uninitiated tourist).  Taxis in Quito seem to top even the most white-knuckle-grip experiences I’ve had in cities in the U.S.  One private driver we hired was an amazing and knowledgeable personal tour guide as he deftly navigated the different terrains, while another had never been to the destination we hired him to take us to and ended up depending on us for map navigation.  The Quito airport runway is a little bit short and sits smack dab in the middle of a densely populated city, so takeoffs and landings were a little nerve-wracking.  And it turns out that I am capable of getting quite sea sick, which I found out on night #1 on our Galapagos boat in the form of an evening-long  vomiting session on the sundeck.  Things got better from there, thanks in no small part to the great care from Kelly and the crew (and Scopolamine), but there were some moments where I wasn’t sure I was going to make it.  All in all, figuring out transportation was an adventure in itself.

This trip was the first real international travel I’d done in more than a decade, and my first time to South America.  Despite all of my detail-oriented preparation lists and packing and figuring out finances and scattered attempts to brush up on Spanish, in the end I just dove into the experience and let it take me where it would – this almost always resulted in great joy.  It was an honor to travel with Kelly, and we took good care of each other while enjoying the company greatly.  Ecuador was a beautiful, welcoming, diverse, complicated, amazing place to visit, and the experiences we had there were perspective-bringing and life-giving.

I’ll be happy to tell you more about it when I see you next.

• Have a young one or someone who gets overwhelmed by the language in standard Wikipedia articles?  Try Simple Wikipedia, which only uses simple English words and grammar.
• Jim Hair posted a Youtube video of photographs from his trip to the Inauguration.  He’s got DVDs available too.
• Literal Music Videos – what your favorite artists were really trying to say
• A few new (at least to me) local blogs to check out: Michele is rennovating a cool house here in Richmond, Adrienne is blogging about books and various other things, Cassie is blogging about life at IU East and in Richmond and also has a pet sitting service blog, Nate is looking at technology as a means to community empowerment and engagement, and Jay is writing about outdoor experiential education.  Keep it up, folks!
  
• 25 people to blame for the financial crisis (according to TIME magazine).  Be careful, you might be one of them.

A related trend I’m appreciating is the increasing number of tools available to help make online conversations more personalized.  A particular tool I’d like to encourage you to start using right now is that of a Gravatar – a “globally recognized avatar” – which displays an image of your choosing (sometimes a photo of you) next to your contributions to online conversations.

Here are 4 reasons why you should:

1. If you’re someone who participates in online discussions (responding to blog comments, adding forum posts, etc.), uploading your gravatar image is a way of creating a consistent and personalized online identity across all of the sites you visit.  Just sign up, upload your image, and you’re done.
2. If you’re a content publisher (blogger, forum administrator, chat room host), using gravatars gives your participants the ability to express their identity beyond just text characters on a page or a clever nickname.  This strengthens your online community, adds some color and flare, and is a free, easy way to do it.  Some people are even using them on technical conference badges.
3. Gravatars are secure and consolidated – gravatar owners aren’t able to tell when you make use of their images, and you can always change or remove your image later if you decide you don’t want it public.  The images are hosted on the Gravatar.com server, so a change in that one place instantly takes effect on any site where you’ve contributed.
4. Gravatars are easy to implement – there are plugins available for most known content publishing platforms (e.g. WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal, Joomla) and even some desktop applications (e.g. the Mac OS X Addressbook).  There are reference implementations available for most languages used to build web pages and online applications.  This means that we can leave behind the days of implementing our own profile image management systems, or at least start to come to a better standard about how they should work.

I’m posting below the Gravatars of the last 9 people who commented on this blog.  As of this initial writing, only one of them has uploaded their image, the rest are just the default image – won’t you help me make that square (or any comments you might post below) a little more pretty by showing us your smiling mugshot?  (The images below will update as people upload, so check back.)

With the photo here, I don’t even know what the hell is going on. It’s like the creepy older guy is trying to arm wrestle with the maniacally screaming younger dude over who gets to use the laptop, while the two women totally ignore them and instead grin broadly at the hamster dancing on their screen. But I’m like “creepy older dude, BACK OFF!” Why does he need to lunge into younger dude’s space like that, using his fingertips as a push-off to further invade? And why won’t either of the women help younger dude? This is some messed up stock photography. What was the photographer yelling at them? “Pretend you went to the office holiday party and took Ecstasy!”

I won’t say I’ve never had a hand in building such a website, but with apologies to stock photo models everywhere, I thoroughly discourage this practice. If you really want to put a human face on your website, then put your face on it (or that of your staff, customers, partners, family, etc.) When you use a stock photo of an ethnically balanced group of people to show how diverse and contemporary you are, you look stupid. When you use a stock photo of a bunch of high-powered blinking servers stacked up in a huge data center to show that you know something about technology, you look stupid. When you use real pictures of real people related to you or your organization, then you look authentic. If you can’t do that, then consider doing without the photos altogether.

• Schmap Nashville Travel Guide: a couple of photos I took at the Tennessee State Museuem are apparently now a part of the fourth edition of this online tourist guide. There may be a print version too, but I’m not sure where to find it.
• All Around Ohio for November 11: a photo I took of Antioch Hall at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio was featured in an article about the college staying open.