Retire to Ecuador? Why not!

We never cease to be amazed at the people who think we are in the middle of an African desert with no modern conveniences available. This couldn't be further from the truth. First, we aren't in Africa, we are in South America. Here's a little map to help you orient yourself as to where we are living. This one shows the country of Ecuador and we are living in Azuay province and if you look close, you will see Cuenca. We have good electric service, great tap water and decent Internet. We have lost water once since we arrived three months ago. If you don't count the power outages while they installed new poles, we have lost power twice and one of those was from an accident up the road from us. Our gas stove is great and so is our refrigerator, albeit a little noisy. We do have grocery stores, big and small. We do have hardware stores, big and small. You can find most things you need for day to day living. You even can find a fair number of US brands bu

We took our first real sightseeing trip last Saturday with our friend and "go to" man, Emilio, as our driver and guide. We were accompanied by our new friend, Kane, who will be relocating to Cuenca late this summer or early this fall. The day started early for us, 8:15 and by 8:30 we had picked up Kane and were headed to Ingapirca (Wall of the Inca),  about a 90 minute drive from Cuenca. We had brought warm clothes as well as rain gear since the weather can change rapidly. The drive there took us through some beautiful country and before we knew it, we were on the last few miles of our trip. As we drove through a small town we saw the community working to help with the road work being done. Unfortunately for us, the road was temporarily closed and we had to take an interesting detour through the back roads. Soon we arrived at Ingaprica, got registered and paid our admittance. I paid $1 since I am Tercera Edad (third age), Stu paid $2 and Kane paid $6 since he