In October 2009 I was lucky enough to travel in Ecuador again for the first time in 19 years. Back then was my first trip to South America and I was a part of a Heliconia Society International organised trip, which made travelling around for a gringo like me, with no Spanish, much easier. My travelling companions this time were Carla Black, Angel Rodriguez and Dave Skinner.

This time around we did some serious homework beforehand, looking at collection data from species publications, talking to experts and getting some very detailed information on where to find some plants that we were keen to try and find. Without this information we would have spent days driving around wasting precious time. Plans were made and over a 3 month period we worked out an itinerary to try to go to some areas that Carla, Angel, Dave and myself hadn't been to before.

In our 14 days we travelled over 3400 km, with Angel at the wheel driving like a machine with a Zen like calm that I've never seen, over some good roads, some bad roads and even some roads that required major earthmoving equipment to allow us to pass. Twice we had to alter our planned routes due to landslides, turning around and finding another way to get to planned habitats we were interested in visiting. Since this was the end of the dry season I'm sure we picked a good time of year to get around too. Angel had to put up with lots of 'Oooh, aaahhh, look-at-that!' type of behaviour from inveterate plant fanciers, but the only way to stop the car was to say 'Stop!' He also had to put up with people trying to get out of the moving car to try to get to plants that were spied as we motored around this beautiful country, as well as dealing with cities, towns and rural areas that bore absolutely no similarity to our two maps purchased to find our way around, not to mention the Ecuadorian traffic that had no interest in going slow to look at their native plants. So Angel had to relax, move to the right and allow all manner of traffic to overtake, as we trawled our way slowly along, in places with very narrow, steep dirt and sometimes rough, river-rock roads.

The first region we travelled to was Zamora Chinchipe Province, situated at the far south Eastern edge of Ecuador, bordering Peru. This took us the best part of two days' driving, to get from Quito, the capital city, our starting point, to our jungle lodge in Las Orqideas, deep in the forests of Zamora Chinchipe. A landslide on the Gualaceo-Gualaquiza road on our second day meant we had to back track and head to Limon instead, adding 3-4 extra hours to our journey. The upside for me was seeing flowering Racinea tetrantha, Guzmanias and Pitcairnia trianiae (see back cover photo) as we came down twice through the cloud forest area elevations...