Report from Quito

How we got here.

I regret to say that the magazine International Living — also known as International Lying for its propensity to make astounding claims about all the places the typical American could live on, like, forty-seven cents per year — planted the seed in an article about Loja, a city in southern Ecuador. To hear IL tell it, Loja is the Paris of South America. Much like Madison, Wisconsin is the Paris of the Upper Midwest and Asheville, North Carolina is the Paris of the South.

That seed blossomed into hours of research on YouTube. Thousands of people post videos about their travels, but Amelia and JP made it their life’s work to get you and me to ditch the U.S. and go where the living is easy: Ecuador.

We had been to South America before: Chile in 2012, where Bill’s sister had emigrated. (She later moved to Peru and now lives in Portugal.) We had also been to Costa Rica. We knew Latin America was different from Europe, where all my previous international travel had taken place, in ways we appreciated. For me, mainly, it was the lack of smug self-consciousness, about which more later. Maybe.

We began looking into emigration during Voldemort’s first administration. We would stay put until Charlie finished high school in 2021, but in the meantime we could watch videos — and, holy cats, are there a lot of them.

Amelia and JP posted week after week about the good life in Ecuador — and they lived in lots of different places, including Cuenca, coastal cities like Manta and Olon, and Quito’s posh suburb Cumbaya. They were our main gurus, but many other YouTubers will tell you, with varying degrees of sophistication, about Ecuador’s advantages. If you’re looking for how-to advice, Amelia and JP have much to offer in that realm, resulting in — I’m sure — many happy U.S. emigres.

In 2021, with Voldemort out of office and the kid in college — and enough salary to keep the bills paid — we continued our research. We made our first trip to Ecuador in 2023, timing it to coincide with Charlie’s spring break.

We had a great time! We did vacation things, spending several days at Hacienda los Mortiños in Cotopaxi National Park. That’s the volcano Cotopaxi above, as we woke up and saw it one morning from our room at the hacienda.

When Charlie’s week with us ended, we headed to Loja to see why International Living loved it so. It has everything: hospitals, a thriving arts scene, and at least one university.

We hired Jonathan from Life in Loja to show us the high points (including an artist at work on a door, above), which was time and money well spent — as indeed, almost all private tours are. We met up with a younger couple who had moved to Loja from Minneapolis, and they were ecstatic about the town and its residents. But to us it felt cut off from the world, mostly because it is. A four-hour drive from Cuenca, it’s situated well away from the next big city. It felt too remote.

We could have traveled to other Latin American countries, but the following year we returned to Ecuador; again Charlie was with us for a week. His Spanish is pretty good, which is not true for Bill and me (yet), and he’s usually fun to have around anyway. During the first of our two weeks in Cuenca (see photo from a favorite vantage below), we gauged his reaction to the place his old parents were thinking about moving. It was positive.

And yet.

Cuenca is a short flight from Quito, but it’s just that much farther. If Charlie, who now has a job in Wisconsin, needs us, I want to be able to get back as quickly as possible, and being two flights away felt better than three. For all its charms, Cuenca is chock-a-block with geriatric North American gringos. We met some of them at Apartamentos Otorongo, recommended by Amelia and JP (natch), and were overwhelmed by the organ recitals.

Am I a hypocrite? Yes. Yes, I am.

Read a book called Gringolandia, if you can get through it, which I couldn’t, for more on the social science of why so many white folks have chosen to re-colonize Cuenca, and why white people think they can move anywhere but brown people can’t.

In late 2024, with Voldemort renewing his tiny-handed grip on the galaxy, the urgency became real. So did the power problems in Ecuador. A drought had led to insufficient hydroelectricity, and the government shut off the juice to the entire country for durations that seemed draconian to us, safe and well-lit in Minnesota. We began looking hard at Medellin, which we learned might feed Bill’s 60-year cycling passion.

But our hearts and hopes came back to Ecuador. It was at least partially a known quantity. We had been there, we liked it, and we had come to realize that Ecuadorians are a phenomenally warm, welcoming group of people. Way nicer than lots of Americans, especially these days.