Hola, Ecuador!

Finally, finally… we are in Quito, Ecuador.

There’s not much else to say about how much we’d been anticipating this trip. I’ve already said it all, and I don’t want to repeat myself too much. Feel free to read more here, and here, and here if you want the whole background on the situation.

But now, we are here. And I’m so excited to have something to write about again!

I guess I’m going to start by sharing the story of our travels and everything that we needed to get into Ecuador. Here we go!

Preparation

The last time I wrote, at the end of November, all that was required to enter Ecuador was a vaccine card proving that you’d been vaccinated at least two weeks prior. A few days later, in December, the requirement changed: travelers would now need a vaccine card in addition to a negative PCR covid test taken no more than 72 hours before entry into the country. You also need a health declaration form that you fill out online, print, and bring with you.

So as soon as I found out about that, I made us appointments at a local urgent care in Kansas City for the day before we left. I’m so glad that I did that early in December, because as we all know, covid testing (and cases) have really ramped up since then.

We left on January 8, and basically as soon as Christmas was over, we isolated ourselves as much as possible at home and tried not to see anyone else. We didn’t want to risk catching anything that could put our trip at risk. In the few cases we did have to see someone, we wore N95 masks even when indoors. And luckily, all our caution paid off. Getting that negative test on Friday felt so good.

(We also decided that, if we had tested positive, we wouldn’t cancel the trip — we would have postponed it a few weeks until we were healthy again and then extended our stay in Ecuador. Having a backup plan helped with the nerves.)

Edit: As of February 11, 2022, a PCR test is only needed if you are unvaccinated or it has been fewer than 14 days since you became fully vaccinated.

Other Preparation Stuff…

-We also bought travel insurance. I haven’t really done that before, but I figured this is the longest I’ve been away from the U.S. without insurance being provided for me. One option to consider is SafetyWing Nomad Insurance if you’re going to be traveling for a month or more, like we were.

SafetyWing Nomad Insurance is for nomads, by nomads! One of the highlights is that it’s super flexible. It works like a subscription, and they offer multiple services for different sort of nomads, travelers and remote workers. Not only is it available for purchase in 180 countries, but you can also buy it while you’re already traveling — which is something other companies don’t offer.

-As is my custom when taking a trip, I prepared a detailed itinerary for my parents and Matt’s parents. I think parents never feel 100% about letting their little babies travel around the world “alone,” but the itinerary helps. I shared it in a Google Drive, and I also printed out a copy for us. It can help to have everything laid out on paper, like flight times and Airbnb addresses, for times when your phone is dead or won’t connect.

-Along with that, we scanned a copy of our passports and vaccine cards and added them to the Google Drive. We also printed them out, just in case.

Travel to Miami, Florida

If you didn’t know by now, we live in Kansas City. As you might be able to guess if you know where Kansas City is, there aren’t really a lot of great options for international flights. We almost always fly somewhere else first, like Chicago or Boston, using Southwest points. Then, it’s cheaper to get a direct international flight.

This was also the case for going to Ecuador. From Miami, direct flights to Quito were short (about four hours) and fairly cheap (less than $300 round-trip.) So on Saturday morning, my parents dropped us off at the airport for our direct flight from Kansas City to Miami.

Trying to squeeze two individual “legs” of our trip into one day sounded a little stressful, especially during the winter when Midwest flights are often delayed or canceled due to weather. We also didn’t love the idea of arriving into Quito in the middle of the night since neither of us had been here before. That made it an easy decision to book an airport hotel in Miami for the night and schedule our international flight for the next morning.

Despite all the canceled flights during the past few weeks, everything went seamlessly. When we arrived in Miami, we took a quick peek at the Departures level of the airport while we waited for our airport shuttle to pick us up. I was curious about where/when we’d have to present our vaccine paperwork and negative covid test in the morning. We didn’t get an answer to that, but I did get Anxiety. Because the airport was crazy busy with people lined up for what looked like miles.

Note: During both of our trips, we wore N95 masks and did not take them off at all from the time we entered transportation/the airport until the time we left the airport. Like, we didn’t even take them off to eat anything or drink a sip of water. A lot of other people were doing their own thing, but we tried to do our best to keep ourselves and others as safe as possible.

Here’s the video version of the day. We can thank Matt for this!

 

Travel to Quito, Ecuador

We signed up to take the 7am shuttle, which would theoretically get us to the airport around 7:15. Our flight was scheduled to depart at 10:15am, so we felt like 3 hours early was good. Kind of. The memories of the check-in lines the day before were haunting me. When we woke up at 6:15am to pack up, Matt’s phone notified him that boarding was at 9:30am, which was apparently earlier than he expected, and suddenly he was asking me whether getting there at 7:15 would be enough.

Personally, I never need to be convinced to leave painfully early “just in case,” so we booked an Uber and got to the airport before 7.

Thankfully, it wasn’t nearly as busy. And we soon found out the process for our documents being checked. Instead of going directly to the check-in and bag-drop line, we had to wait in a different line first. When we got to the front, we had to show our passport, vaccine card, covid test, and health form. Then we received a little green slip of paper that said “Docs OK” for us to take to the check-in counter.

We were through everything — including security — by 7:30. Which meant two hours of sitting at the gate. But I didn’t mind. I was just ecstatic that everything had gone right! Then, when we got on the plane, it turned out the third person in our row didn’t show up. Que suerte. And knowing that everyone on the plane was vaccinated and had tested negative made our 4-hour flight to Quito a pretty relaxed experience.

When we arrived in Quito, passport control and customs were probably the shortest lines I’ve ever been in anywhere in the world. We did have to turn in our health forms, so I was glad I’d printed ours out instead of just showing it on my phone. When we got out of the airport, I ordered a taxi with Cabify who drove us to our Airbnb and provided me with my first Spanish conversation in 18 months.

Everything is going great so far. I’m going to leave you for now with this video so you don’t have to read anymore.

 

Let me know if you have any questions about requirements for getting into Ecuador. What do you think of the videos? I’ll keep sharing Matt’s videos on my channel so feel free to subscribe.

Hasta la proxima!

-Cathy

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Originally Published on January 11, 2022.