I once made the mistake of leaving the Andes by bus one afternoon for a flight deep into the Amazon the next morning. I didn’t have much choice—the road downhill, under construction since the Crusades, was only opened two nights a week—but I’d been in Ecaudor long enough to know better.

  Our bus pulled away from Baños’s dripping green backdrop as the sun faded over the black church steeple. It started to rain, then pour. At the mouth of the first tunnel we waited three hours, with the roar of the Devil’s Cauldron waterfall off in the darkness, until someone, somewhere, decided we could proceed.

  The next thing I know I’m on a streetcorner in Puyo at 2 a.m., waiting for a connecting bus and holding my backpack over my head to keep from drowning. It arrives, we leave, and I fall back asleep. Suddenly I’m jostled awake to find our bus stopped and almost empty. It’s still dark, and the noises outside are of the night rainforest, not a jungle city.

  I follow my fellow travelers outside to find everyone lugging their bags over a swaying wooden bridge in the misty darkness. The main span was washed out in a flood, and another bus waits for us on the other side to continue to Macas. Water drips down the back of my neck as I wonder how much worse this journey can get.

  Halfway across, the clouds part and I halt in wonder. Stars like sand blaze down from above, turning the wide, lazy river into an ocean of light. On either side, the dark forest echoes with alien cries, filling the air with the rich scent of earth and life. I barely make the connecting bus and my flight later that morning.

  Writers are always looking for metaphors, and sometimes they fall into your lap. Whether it’s the gorgeous flowers poking over the broken glass atop a high brick wall, or the peasant placidly watching his herd in an airy Andean field as luxury cars zip by on the highway, Latin America in particular seems to lend itself to them.

  Despite its frustrations, Ecuador sometimes seems almost too good to be true—a country the size of Colorado with twice as many birds as all of Europe, so volcanically lush that orchids grow like weeds and rows of fenceposts take root and sprout leaves. In one handy package, Ecuador wraps up South America’s big three attractions—the snowy Andes, the steamy Amazon, and hundreds of miles of Pacific beaches—together with one attraction no other country on Earth has: the Galápagos Islands. And everything is within a day’s travel of the capital, and they use U.S. dollars, and the government is reasonably stable, and on, and on.

  So I’ll leave my moment over the river as it is, along with the countless others I’ve accumulated over the years I’ve spent traveling in Ecuador: the smell of eucalyptus from the top of a bus in the thin air of the mountains, the ghostly roar of a howler monkey in the Amazon, a whale shark swimming past in the Galápagos like a huge, spotted bus. Along with those go the memories of the stink of bus exhaust, the sting of sunburn, and the dull taste of potatoes, again. I’m leaving room for more in the decades to come.

  And next time, I’m flying to the jungle.