Hola all

right so this will just be a quick entry.. WELL - I e-mailed NZ's honorary consul for Ecuador some time ago asking if I needed a visa to stay longer then 90 days (I want to stay for 15 weeks - 2.5 more than the 12.5 that 90 days represents ). Well, I know you need a visa if you want to be there more than 90 days at one time but the point is my time would be split like.. 60 days/ 45 days with a break of 8 weeks in between when I was in Peru, Bolivia and northern Argentina. Well this lady assured me ("100%")that that was ok because I was going out of the country and would be coming back, so I could just be reissued with a new "T3 tourist card", valid for 90 days. But then I rang the ecuadorian embassy in australia to be 100% sure and was informed that the laws have changed - you can't be reissued a card like that and if I wanted to stay that full 15 weeks, I would thus have to get a visa. I still actually had the time to do it but it would cost US$310- this would make it quite uneconomic when I could just spend an extra 2 weeks in bolivia or Peru and save that $300 which would get you about 2 weeks of travel on the road on a budget anyway.

so I've decided to turn it to my advantage..basically the upshot is that I will be have more time in south america out of Ecuador which I will use primarily to explore the great wildernesses of the continent - the Amazon of Peru and Bolivia (and maybe down into Brazil..), the altiplano, the gran chaco, the pantanal and los llanos de moxos in eastern Bolivia. Bolivia sounds pretty extreme/awesome as travel destinations go really; put it this way. This country is the size of Spain and France combined - together these 2 european countries have 111 million people between them. Bolivia has 8 million - the lowest population density on the continent - no wonder they've got so many enormous national parks! While this change does mean I can't quite see everything I had wanted to in Ecuador, I will only miss about a week's worth of travelling seeing things I had planned to and on the other hand it gives me much more time to explore even wilder areas of the continent.

It's going to be hard to say how frequent future entries will be but I will try to do at least 1 a week - in practice it tends to vary a bit as things unfold but we'll see how it goes. Only 2 days untill i leave now! :D

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