My trip to Ecuador in January/February/March of 2018 began a year and a half earlier with an invitation to sail across the open Pacific Ocean from the Galapagos Islands to "Hiva Oa", a small island in French Polynesia. The invitation came from an acquaintance of mine, Nikki Schmidt, whom I'd met while on my trek through Bhutan in May of 2015. You can view the travel images of that trip in a separate gallery in this website. Nikki was recently retired and was preparing to sail around the world in a state of the art ocean going yacht he was having built in Denmark. His plan was to take a year and and join up with the sailing group of yachts know as "A.R.C.". The were to begin and end their sail around the in the Caribbean Sea. Nikki would be using a continuously shifting group of family and friends to help him crew his boat while on this journey. When he began to field out the specific individuals who would join him on the dozens of legs of the lengthy adventure he was having trouble finding people who would commit to the sail across the open ocean(s). That's when he sent me an email and invited me to join him on this leg from the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador to Hiva Oa in French Polynesia. I felt this was an exciting opportunity and I immediately accepted his invitation. In order or me to rendezvous with his boat I needed to be in the Galapagos Islands by the end of February 2018 when he planned to arrive there after sailing westward across the Caribbean through the Panama Canal. I made my plans to fly to Ecuador and then the Galapagos to meet up with him. Since I would already be on the mainland of Ecuador naturally I felt the urge to also visit some of the countryside before flying over to the Galapagos islands. I stayed in Ecuador for three weeks and saw much of the cities of Quito, Cuenca and Vilcabamba where I engaged in an "Ayahuascan" retreat including three ceremonies. One was "San Pedro", a second was "Ayahuasca", and a third was "Wilca". My trip on the mainland ended February 6th when I flew over to the Galapagos islands and joined a commercial tour boat for a two week trip around most of the islands in the Galapagos Island chain. The images from that sailing trip are in a different gallery in this web site and I invite you to view those images as well. These are my images from my three weeks in Ecuador
© Steve Tambosso - "The Wandering Fireman"
