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If there’s one book that nails Ecuadorian culture on the head, it’s the eloquent and humorous Living Poor, written by Moritz Thomsen, a 48-year-old Peace Corps volunteer on the Ecuadorian coast during the 1960s.
Joe Kane’s Savages is a more recently written account of life on the other side of the Andes, an eye-opening (and sometimes hilarious) look at how the oil industry effects the indigenous Huaoranis and the rain forest.
As for the Galápagos, no list of books is complete without Kurt Vonnegut’s whimsical novel Galápagos, in which vacationers are stranded on the islands and become the progenitors for a strange new twist in human evolution.
The Panama Hat Trail, by Tom Miller, is a fascinating book about the author’s search for that most quintessential and misnamed of Ecuadorian products, the panama hat.
For a more poetic (and surrealist) impression of the country, read Ecuador: A Travel Journal, by Henri Michaux, a Belgian-born poet, writer and painter who crafted this strange mix of poetry and travel journal after spending a year here in the 1920s.
Anthony Smith’s The Lost Lady of the Amazon is a fascinating and gripping reconstruction of Isabela Godin’s horrific 18th-century journey from the Andes to the Amazon. Godin was the wife of a scientist on La Condamine’s equatorial mission.
In Floreana, Margaret Wittmer tells her bizarre (and true) story of living off the land in the Galápagos with her eccentric husband. Murder, struggle and vegetarianism all come into play.
Finally, British climber Edward Whymper’s Travels Amongst the Great Andes of the Equator is a climbing classic. Although published in 1892, it reads as beautifully today as any in the genre.
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