about US

Originally from London, England the family immigrated to the USA back in the mid 1960's, this is what started my love of travel. It's a big planet and unfortunately we are not blessed with an infinite amount of time to see it all. So from many trips back to England with side trips to Scotland, Wales & then Europe I have never looked back. A photographer by profession my need to see and photograph new and different places only increased. After additional travels all over Europe, Finland & Egypt I simply fell in love with Latin America and its people, something that continues to this day. The cultures, spectacular Andes mountains & the Amazon basin just take my breath away. Which is why I have continued to go south since 1996.

I enjoy new experiences and my travels have included many years of caving in the USA, rappelling/climbing the deep pits of central Mexico, Rappelling/climbing 2,650ft El Capitan, Multiple skydives, experiencing full aerobatics from inside the open cockpit of a 1939 WACO biplane as well as becoming a certified SCUBA diver at age thirteen.

My wife of twenty six years, she has put up with my love of travel and the outdoors with hardly a whimper and embraced it more each year. From roach motels in Mexico to camping in three feet of new snow twenty six miles back in the Hoh Rain Forest of Olympic National Park in Washington State.

She has always been up for an adventure from bungee jumping to skydiving to talking our way out of a police checkpoint on a lonely stretch of Argentinean highway, with less than stellar Spanish I might add. She has been my right hand from Cairo to Quito and everywhere in between. We have experienced the grandeur of Iguazu Falls in the Brazilian/Argentinean rainforest which makes Niagara look like a leaky faucet to the snowcapped Andes and the calving of Glaciers in Patagonia.

Get out there and see this stuff, there isn't anything like it anywhere else...

Our buddy Roger is an ex-Peace Corps volunteer who was stationed in Ecuador for three years. He now lives there and has recently bought a small house on a piece of land with a view that will leave the ones lucky enough to see it speechless.

We actually met in a Spanish class at a local community college & from there built up a very good and lasting friendship. He made the mistake several years back of saying to us..."hey, if you guys are ever on one of your crazy South American trips and are going to be in the neighborhood, well stop by"...and so we did and so we continue to do so.

We make a point of getting together each year in Ecuador & he has been our travel/trekking partner to some great places. He has also travelled throughout Colombia & Peru, as well as many, many places in Ecuador. On several occasions with his grown son & daughters along with him.

Roger has been kind enough to allow us to use excerpts from his blog that he started when he first arrived in Ecuador several years back. His insights to the country, as well as other areas of South America, after being immersed in it for all these past years, has been a huge plus for this site and made for some great additional personal insights. Here is a link to his blog: http://ecuador26.blogspot.com/

He is about as down to earth as they come and there is no one better to drink a beer with or a glass of Jameson's Irish Whiskey, while shooting the breeze & eating a big bag of salchi papas on a cool Ecuadorian night...