OFFROAD Ecuador ADVenture Self-Guided Motorcycle Tour

The Self-Guided OFFROAD Ecuador ADVenture is six days for riders looking for travel that is connected, engaging, and earned — the kind that puts you in the middle of Ecuador instead of simply moving you through it.

You’ll ride from the high Andes through cloudforest, remote farming country, páramo, tropical lowlands, and back into the mountains again. The route mixes dirt, mud, cobblestones, steep climbs, river crossings, changing weather, and long riding days with some of the most beautiful and interesting parts of the country.

But the scenery is only part of it. You stop to understand what is going on around you. You’ll meet farmers, artisans, cheese makers, coffee growers, carpenters, and families; see what people are growing and making; taste local food; and spend time in communities most visitors never get close to.

Because it is self-guided, you ride independently with a programmed Garmin GPS, detailed Road Book, local phone, back-office monitoring, and 24-hour support from people who know the route firsthand.

The tour carries our 5/5 Challenging rating because it demands more stamina, concentration, and time management than our other tours. The rating is relative to the rest of the Ecuador Freedom lineup, not a claim that this is extreme enduro riding.

If you want a motorcycle trip that makes you participate, engage with the country, and come home with stories you actually earned, start reading the day-by-day itinerary.

⚠ WARNING: This is not a normal motorcycle ride. This tour requires elements of endurance and stamina. Riders must be able to ride in adverse weather conditions and adverse road conditions for extended periods of time (up to 10 hours).

Day 1

Quito – Intiñan – San José de Minas – Laguna de Mojanda – Otavalo

Your six-day Self-Guided OFFROAD Ecuador ADVenture begins at Ecuador Freedom Bike Rental in Quito’s La Carolina neighborhood. Quito sits high in the Andes at approximately 2,850 meters / 9,350 feet, directly on the Equator and surrounded by volcanoes, steep valleys, and some of the most dramatic geography of any capital city in the world.

Before departure, one of our experienced guides who knows this route firsthand will take you through a comprehensive pre-ride briefing covering the route, Ecuadorian traffic customs, road conditions, fuel stops, weather, cultural stops, accommodations, and the terrain ahead. We’ll also make sure you are comfortable with the motorcycle, luggage system, and controls before you head out.

Your programmed Garmin GPS handles the turn-by-turn navigation, while your Ecuador Freedom Road Book gives you the information behind the route: important stops, fuel and food information, cultural and historical details, practical notes, and the local knowledge that helps keep the day running smoothly. You’ll also carry a local cell phone, and our team will monitor your progress during riding days with 24-hour support available if you need us.

Day 1 gives you a proper sample of what the next six days are going to look like: pavement, cobblestone, natural dirt roads, agricultural valleys, dry canyon country, high páramo, mountain weather, and a steady progression away from the city and into rural Ecuador. It is a full day, and there is a lot packed into it, so the trick is to enjoy the stops without letting the clock get away from you.

The first stop is the Intiñan Solar Museum, located directly on the Equator. Intiñan means “Path of the Sun” in Kichwa, and the museum explores how Indigenous cultures understood astronomy, seasons, agriculture, and the movement of the sun long before modern surveying equipment arrived.

You can stand with a boot in each hemisphere and try the museum’s familiar demonstrations involving balance, water, shadows, and latitude. Your Road Book gives you additional background on the site and why the Equator has held such importance to the people living in this part of the Andes for centuries.

The visit is worth doing, but keep an eye on the time. There is still a lot of country ahead, including the dirt roads above San José de Minas, the hand-laid cobblestones, the high páramo at Mojanda, and the descent into Otavalo.

Leaving the Equator, the programmed route drops into a dry canyon landscape that looks considerably different from the green Ecuador most visitors expect. The road cuts through steep walls and scrubby vegetation before climbing again toward greener agricultural country.

Vegetable fields, dairy farms, rose greenhouses, eucalyptus trees, and small farming communities begin replacing the dry canyon as you work toward San José de Minas.

The town is known for its stone church, tidy central plaza, and relaxed highland atmosphere. It also marks the point where the day begins getting considerably more interesting for anyone who came to Ecuador to ride dirt.

From San José de Minas, the pavement is left behind and the route heads into the mountains on a natural dirt road through some of the most beautiful farming country in northern Ecuador. Green fields cover the hillsides, cattle graze beside the road, and small family farms are scattered across the slopes with the mountains rising behind them.

Before long, you’ll come to a small river crossing — nothing heroic, but enough water and loose rock to remind you why you brought an adventure motorcycle instead of a rental car. Take a second to look at the crossing, pick a sensible line, and keep moving.

From there, the road begins climbing steadily toward the high Andes.

Then the dirt gives way to something much older: several miles of ancient hand-laid cobblestone road. These roads were built stone by stone, long before anybody showed up with asphalt, graders, or yellow paint. In many places they are still maintained the same way today — by hand, replacing and resetting individual stones as generations of local residents have done before them.

The cobbles twist uphill through intensely green farmland, past small houses, grazing animals, cultivated fields, and broad views across the valleys below. They can be smooth in one section, rough and uneven in the next, and occasionally remind you that motorcycle suspension was a pretty useful invention.

As the route climbs above 11,000 feet / 3,350 meters, the farms gradually become smaller and the landscape begins changing. Trees thin out, temperatures drop, and the cultivated hillsides start giving way to the open grasslands of the high Andes.

This stretch is one of the great transitions of the day. In a relatively short distance you go from warm agricultural valleys, through a river crossing and miles of hand-built cobblestone, into increasingly remote mountain country. Traffic becomes increasingly theoretical, the views get considerably bigger, and the road keeps climbing.

This is also your first real opportunity to settle into the motorcycle on Ecuadorian backroads. Stay loose on the bars, look where you want to go, and let the bike move underneath you. Enjoy the views when you stop, but keep the day moving — there is still a lot of riding between here and Otavalo.

The route eventually climbs above 12,000 feet / 3,700 meters into the high Andean páramo. The last cultivated fields disappear and the landscape opens into rolling grassland, volcanic slopes, dark mountain lakes, and fast-moving clouds.

This is a good place to add a layer if you need one. Mojanda can go from postcard to refrigerator surprisingly quickly when the clouds roll across the mountains.

The final approach to Laguna de Mojanda continues across the open páramo on dirt roads surrounded by volcanic mountains and high grasslands. Up here there are few buildings, very little traffic, and plenty of room to appreciate just how quickly the country has changed since leaving Quito that morning.

The road reaches the beautiful high-altitude lake beneath the slopes of Fuya Fuya. The cold water, open grasslands, and surrounding volcanic terrain feel worlds away from the dry canyon you crossed only a few hours earlier.

That rapid change is one of the things Ecuador does particularly well.

From Mojanda, your GPS route begins descending toward Otavalo, one of the most important Indigenous commercial centers in the Andes.

The Otavaleño people are famous throughout Ecuador and far beyond it for weaving, music, craftsmanship, and an extraordinary tradition of commerce. Otavaleño families have traveled throughout South America, Europe, and North America selling textiles and other handmade goods while maintaining a strong cultural identity at home.

At the Plaza de los Ponchos, textiles, jewelry, hats, leather goods, spices, carvings, and brightly colored woven products fill the market stalls. Depending on how the day has gone, you may arrive with enough time for a quick walk through before heading to the hotel.

If you are running late, don’t try to force it. The market starts very early every morning, so you can come back the next day before continuing the route. After the dirt, river crossing, miles of cobblestone, and high páramo, that is often the smarter move.

The market is part of a living commercial tradition rather than something created solely for visitors. Produce, clothing, household goods, food, crafts, and textiles all move through Otavalo, and the surrounding communities remain deeply connected to the town.

If you find something you want to buy, you do not necessarily have to figure out how to strap it to the motorcycle. Servientrega provides inexpensive parcel shipping throughout Ecuador, and purchases made along the way can be shipped back to the Ecuador Freedom office in Quito for you to collect when you return.

That makes buying a blanket, piece of artwork, leatherwork, or some other questionable impulse purchase considerably easier to justify.

The day ends on the shores of Lake San Pablo, beneath the slopes of Imbabura Volcano, at Hostería Cabañas del Lago.

You’ll settle into your private lakeside cabin, sit down to dinner, and have the chance to warm up beside a wood-burning fireplace.

It is a comfortable finish to a full first day that has already carried you across the Equator, through dry canyon country, agricultural valleys, a river crossing, miles of hand-laid cobblestone, high páramo, Laguna de Mojanda, and one of the most culturally distinctive towns in Ecuador.

The motorcycle gets the night off. You have five more days to make it earn its keep.

Day 2

Otavalo – Cotacachi – Cuicocha Lake – Apuela – Nangulví – Mindo

After a full breakfast on the shore of Lake San Pablo, your programmed route takes you north toward Cotacachi, a town famous throughout Ecuador for its leather artisans. The streets are lined with workshops and small shops selling belts, wallets, jackets, boots, bags, saddlery, and handmade leather goods at prices that can make luggage capacity become an immediate concern.

One of the most memorable stops of the morning is the workshop of our friend Luis, an Indigenous leather tanner who still works hides using traditional, chemical-free methods passed down through generations. Your Road Book gives you the information you need to find his workshop and explains the visit.

Walking into Luis’s place feels a little like stepping through a door into the Middle Ages. There are large piles of animal hides packed in salt, flies doing what flies do, heavy wet skins hanging and drying, and enormous vats where hides soak in vegetable-based tanning solutions. There is nothing polished or sanitized about the place. This is a working tannery, and leather begins here a long way from the clean jackets and handbags hanging in Cotacachi’s storefronts.

Luis works with water, salt, natural vegetable solutions, time, muscle, and experience. Hides are cleaned, soaked, scraped, treated, stretched, dried, and worked repeatedly before they become usable leather. The smell alone makes it very clear that this is a trade learned by doing it for years, not by watching a few videos on the internet.

Seeing the process from raw animal skin to finished leather gives you a completely different appreciation for Cotacachi’s reputation as Ecuador’s leather capital. It is messy, physical, ancient work, and Luis is one of the people keeping that knowledge alive.

Once you have seen the salted hides, tanning vats, scraping, stretching, and drying that go into the process, those finished leather jackets hanging in town suddenly make a lot more sense.

A small tip of around $5–10 for Luis or the family member who shows you around is appreciated.

From Cotacachi, your GPS route continues through small towns and fertile highland farmland toward Laguna Cuicocha, a spectacular volcanic crater lake at the foot of Cotacachi Volcano, which rises to approximately 16,300 feet / 4,968 meters.

Cuicocha was formed by massive volcanic eruptions thousands of years ago. Two forested islands rise from the dark water inside the crater, surrounded by steep volcanic walls and cultivated Andean farmland.

The lake is more than 600 feet deep, and local Indigenous traditions once held that it had no bottom or was connected through a hidden underground passage all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Standing at the rim with cold wind moving across the water, you can understand how a place like this accumulated a few stories over the centuries.

This is another full riding day, so enjoy the overlook and keep the schedule moving. The most remote dirt of the day is still ahead.

After Cuicocha, the pavement disappears and the route heads into some of the most remote country of the day. At first, you stay high in the Andes, crossing exposed mountain country with wide views, cool temperatures, and very little traffic.

From here, you’ll follow unimproved dirt roads through farms, steep hillsides, and tiny settlements that see very few outside visitors. The roads narrow, surfaces change, the valleys get deeper, and the surrounding mountains seem considerably larger once there is no highway running through them.

Cattle, dogs, chickens, and the occasional farmer tend to have a stronger presence than cars.

The dirt road twists across the mountains before beginning a dramatic descent into the Intag River Valley. In a relatively short distance, the air warms, the vegetation thickens, and the high Andean landscape begins changing into something much more tropical.

The riding stays remote as you work your way down through the mountains. Forest replaces open farmland, rivers appear far below, and the road winds through a part of Ecuador that most visitors never see.

Deeper in the Intag Valley, your route passes through the tiny village of Plaza Gutiérrez, where local women have built a cottage industry around a plant called cabuya.

Cabuya looks a lot like the agave used to make tequila, but it is a different plant. Its enormous fleshy leaves contain an exceptionally strong natural fiber that has been used in the Andes for generations.

The leaves are cut, crushed, and stripped of their soft material, leaving behind long, tough fibers that are washed, dried, combed, dyed, and worked by hand.

The women of the Asociación Mujer y Medio Ambiente turn those fibers into hats, bags, baskets, mats, and other handmade goods. What starts as a huge green leaf growing on the side of a mountain eventually becomes something surprisingly refined — although getting from one to the other involves considerably more pounding, scraping, washing, and patience than the finished product lets on.

From Plaza Gutiérrez, the route continues toward Apuela. The dirt road winds deeper into the valley through forest, small farms, rivers, and steep green mountains.

Intag is one of Ecuador’s most beautiful rural regions, known for its rivers, cloudforest, biodiversity, family farms, and excellent coffee. Coffee here is commonly grown beneath banana, naranjilla, guayaba, and other broad-leaf plants that provide shade while also producing food for the families working the land.

The route eventually brings you into the small town of Apuela, where the roads, shops, and farms feel a long way removed from the high Andes you crossed earlier in the morning.

Your Road Book points you toward the Río Intag Coffee Growers, where you can see how locally grown beans are selected, processed, and roasted.

The coffee comes from the same mountains you have just ridden through, much of it grown organically on small family farms tucked into steep green hillsides. The cooperative helps local growers process and market their crop while keeping more of the value within the valley.

There are worse places to drink a cup of coffee than a mountain town surrounded by the farms that grew it.

Keep an eye on the time here. There is still a substantial amount of riding between Apuela and Mindo, with thermal pools, agricultural backroads, a waterfall stop, and cloudforest still ahead.

After lunch, the route continues through the Intag Valley to Nangulví, where you can park the motorcycle and take a break at the thermal pools beside the rushing Intag River.

Motorcycle gear comes off, swimsuits go on, and the warm mineral water takes care of some of what the morning’s dirt roads have done to your shoulders, back, and general opinion of your own fitness.

The pools are surrounded by steep green mountains and tropical vegetation. Enjoy the soak, but remember that this is not the end of the riding day. Mindo is still a good distance away, and the route gets more interesting again as soon as you leave the pools.

Leaving Nangulví, you’ll ride back into the hills through remarkably productive farming country. Small farms cover the slopes and valley bottoms, growing tomatoes, celery, green peppers, and all kinds of other vegetables in the rich soil and warm, wet climate.

The road climbs across several ridges where the vegetation opens just enough to give you beautiful views over the valley. Farms cling to the hillsides, rivers cut through the bottoms of the valleys, and layers of green mountains disappear toward the horizon.

It is one of those stretches where you start wondering exactly who looked at a mountainside this steep and decided it was a perfectly reasonable place to grow tomatoes.

Before continuing toward the cloudforest, your route brings you to Cascada La Piraqua, a local waterfall and swimming hole tucked into the green hills.

It is a good place to get out of the gear again and cool off in the clear water beneath the falls before tackling the final stages of the day.

There is another reason to stop here. Locals press fresh sugar cane and mix the sweet juice with mandarin lemon, producing a cold, sharp, ridiculously refreshing drink that tastes particularly good after a long stretch on a dirt bike.

The sugar cane provides a useful shot of energy, the citrus cuts through the sweetness, and it gives you exactly what you need before getting back on the motorcycle and continuing toward the cloudforest.

From La Piraqua, the programmed route climbs toward the cloudforest. The temperature begins dropping again, mist collects in the trees, and the vegetation becomes noticeably denser as you work your way toward the Nono Biological Reserve.

This part of Ecuador is extraordinarily biodiverse. Orchids, bromeliads, giant ferns, moss-covered trees, insects, amphibians, and hundreds of bird species thrive in the cool, wet forest.

The road itself is part of the experience here, winding through thick vegetation with small waterfalls dropping from the mountainsides and forest closing in around you.

Your route passes Bellavista Bird Lodge, one of Ecuador’s best-known cloudforest birding destinations and a good place for a quick refreshment stop if your schedule is running well.

Even people who claim they have absolutely no interest in birds tend to shut up for a minute when several different hummingbirds start hovering two feet from their heads. With some luck, you may also see toucans, tanagers, barbets, and other cloudforest species around the lodge.

By now, think about how much ground you have covered since breakfast: salted hides and tanning vats in Cotacachi, a volcanic crater lake, high Andean dirt roads, cabuya artisans, locally grown coffee, thermal pools, vegetable farms, a waterfall swim, fresh sugar-cane juice, and now hummingbirds buzzing around your drink.

By late afternoon, the route brings you into Mindo, a small cloudforest town famous for birds, butterflies, rivers, waterfalls, and cacao.

You’ll visit an organic chocolate maker to see how cacao moves from a strange-looking fruit growing on a tree to something most people are considerably more enthusiastic about eating. The process includes harvesting, fermenting, drying, roasting, grinding, and finally turning Ecuadorian cacao into chocolate.

Ecuador is one of the historic homes of fine-aroma cacao, and tasting chocolate where the cacao is actually grown gives you a much better idea of why Ecuadorian cacao has such a strong international reputation.

By this point, you have crossed high Andean dirt roads, dropped into the Intag Valley, visited artisans and coffee growers, soaked in thermal pools, ridden through vegetable farms, cooled off beneath a waterfall, climbed back into the cloudforest, and finished the afternoon with Ecuadorian chocolate. Day 2 does not exactly suffer from a shortage of things to do.

From Mindo, it is a short ride to Séptimo Paraíso Cloudforest Reserve Lodge, set inside its own private cloudforest reserve.

After a day of leather tanning, volcanic lakes, remote dirt roads, cabuya artisans, coffee farms, thermal pools, vegetable country, waterfall swimming, cloudforest, birds, and chocolate, the lodge’s heated swimming pool, jacuzzi, trails, gardens, and billiards room will all look pretty appealing.

Dinner is hearty country-style food accompanied by the lodge’s famous freshly baked onion bread.

By this point, nobody should need much convincing to eat dinner.

Day 3

Mindo – Las Pampas – Sigchos – Chugchilán

Leaving Mindo, your programmed route takes you straight back into the cloudforest, beginning the morning in cool, wet air with heavy green vegetation pressing close to the road and the sound of running water never very far away.

After crossing the roaring Río Blanco, one of Ecuador’s better-known whitewater rivers, you’ll leave the main road and turn onto a winding unpaved route through small rural communities and deep forest.

This is one of the most biologically rich parts of Ecuador. Ornithologists, botanists, and naturalists come from around the world to study these mountains. You get to ride a motorcycle through them.

The road climbs, drops, twists, and climbs again through mist, flowers, wet leaves, mud, forest, and small patches of farmland cut into the mountainsides. After rain, some sections can get properly slick, so stay loose on the motorcycle and pay attention to what is underneath the front tire.

From the cloudforest, the route descends dramatically into warmer rainforest, eventually dropping to around 2,000 feet / 600 meters above sea level.

The temperature rises, humidity increases, and the vegetation changes almost by the kilometer. Ferns and mossy cloudforest give way to thicker tropical growth, broad-leaf plants, cacao, coffee, bananas, and fruit trees.

It is another one of those Ecuadorian transitions that seems slightly unreasonable when you look back at the elevation profile afterward. You start the morning in cool cloudforest, and a few hours later you are riding through warm tropical country.

The route continues through coffee farms, cacao farms, fruit trees, rivers, and tiny settlements, with a few small water crossings thrown in to keep things interesting.

The roads out here see very little traffic. Depending on recent weather, the surface can range from firm dirt to loose rock, mud, washed-out sections, and whatever the last tropical downpour decided to rearrange.

Eventually the route stops descending and the real climb of the day begins.

From here, you’ll be gaining altitude for hours.

The road begins throwing switchback after switchback at you as it climbs through lush jungle, rainforest, pastureland, and scattered farms. Views open across the valley below, then disappear again as you ride back beneath dense vegetation.

Eventually you reach the remote village of San Francisco de las Pampas, tucked deep into the western slopes of the Andes and well away from Ecuador’s main travel routes.

Ecuador Freedom has been riding through this area for years, and the relationships built along the route are part of what makes this tour different. These are places we know, families we know, and roads we have ridden again and again.

In Las Pampas, your Road Book directs you to a local family Ecuador Freedom has known for years, where lunch is waiting.

The food is simple, homemade, and exactly what you want halfway through a long dirt riding day.

This is one of the things that makes the route feel personal. You are not just following a line across a map. Over the years, that line has become a chain of families, farms, kitchens, small businesses, and communities that we return to again and again.

Lunch also provides the necessary calories for what comes next, because the road is nowhere near finished with you.

From Las Pampas, the climb continues through forest, farms, rocky sections, switchbacks, and stretches that can turn muddy when the weather has been enthusiastic.

The higher you climb, the bigger the views become. Warm tropical vegetation gradually disappears, the air cools, and open highland pasture begins replacing the dense forest.

The route eventually reaches approximately 11,400 feet / 3,475 meters, the high point of the day, putting you in a completely different climate from the rainforest you crossed only a few hours earlier.

The landscape opens into high Andean country: cold air, grazing animals, broad valleys, distant ridgelines, enormous skies, and farms hanging onto hillsides that seem far too steep to be useful for anything.

The climb from the tropical lowlands into this high country is one of the great pieces of riding on the entire tour. In the space of a few hours, you have moved from warm rainforest to exposed Andean mountain country under your own power.

As the route crosses the high pass, the road begins working its way toward Sigchos. From up here, the descent can feel a little like bringing an airplane down through the mountains.

Switchbacks curl down the slopes while farms, ridgelines, valleys, and mountain walls slowly come into view beneath you.

Sigchos has been an important settlement for centuries. Long before the Spanish established the modern town in the 16th century, Indigenous communities used this region as part of a network of routes connecting settlements throughout the central Andes.

Today, Sigchos marks your return to the famous Quilotoa Loop, one of Ecuador’s great highland riding regions.

From here, your GPS route continues along sections of old Incan cobblestone road before joining one of the newer paved mountain roads that winds toward Chugchilán.

The landscape is classic central Andes: enormous canyons, high pasture, tiny villages, cultivated mountainsides, sheep and cattle, and roads cut into terrain that does not appear especially interested in accommodating roads.

As the afternoon gets later, the route continues through the mountains toward Chugchilán. Depending on the weather and pace of the day, the last light can turn the surrounding ridges gold while deep shadows settle into the valleys below.

By now, you have ridden from cloudforest into tropical rainforest, crossed rivers, climbed through coffee and cacao country, eaten lunch in a remote mountain village, climbed thousands of feet through switchbacks, crossed the high Andes, and dropped back into the Quilotoa region.

It has been a proper day.

The ride ends at Mama Hilda’s Inn in Chugchilán, a family-run mountain inn that has been welcoming travelers to the Quilotoa region for decades.

Dinner is served family-style, with pots of Ecuadorian food brought to the table and plenty to go around. After the riding you have done today, nobody is going to need a lengthy explanation of why dinner is included.

Mama Hilda’s has hosted Ecuadorian presidents, backpackers, riders, hikers, and travelers from around the world. At the end of Day 3, what matters is considerably simpler: a hot meal, a warm bed, and the satisfaction of having ridden from tropical rainforest to the high Andes in a single day.

Day 4

Chugchilán – Quilotoa Crater Lake – Zumbahua – Angamarca – El Corazón – Simiátug – Salinas de Guaranda

After a hearty breakfast at Mama Hilda’s, your programmed route takes you out of Chugchilán and immediately down into a deep Andean canyon on a narrow dirt road. The route follows the edge of steep slopes through isolated Indigenous communities, with long views across fields worked into terrain that seems far too vertical for farming.

The morning starts with proper mountain drama: rocky precipices, dry forest, steep farms, and narrow roads that demand some attention while the scenery keeps trying to steal it.

Local sheepdogs occasionally charge out to herd motorcycles away from their flocks. They take the assignment seriously, even though nobody asked them.

Keep the pace controlled, give the animals plenty of room, and continue climbing through the canyon country toward one of the great landmarks of the Ecuadorian Andes.

The road gains altitude quickly, winding between exposed cliffs, high farms, and broad mountain views before finally reaching the rim of the Quilotoa caldera.

At approximately 12,800 feet / 3,900 meters, you arrive at Quilotoa Crater Lake. A major eruption roughly 800 years ago emptied the magma chamber beneath the volcano and caused the summit to collapse, creating the enormous caldera seen today.

Minerals dissolved in the water give the lake its remarkable blue-green color, which changes constantly with the light and passing clouds. It is one of those views that tends to stop conversation for a minute.

From Quilotoa, your route continues into Zumbahua, an Indigenous highland town where Kichwa remains widely spoken and traditional clothing is part of everyday life.

This is an excellent place for what can easily become your second breakfast: empanadas de viento, or “wind empanadas.” They are large, crisp pockets of fried dough with surprisingly little inside, usually dusted with sugar. The name is considerably more flattering than “fried dough full of air,” and they provide useful fuel before you head back into the cold, exposed high country.

Depending on what is cooking in the square, you may also find freshly fried potatoes grown in the surrounding fields.

Beyond Zumbahua, the pavement disappears again and your route climbs into the high Andean páramo. The sky becomes enormous, vegetation stays low to the ground, and the road crosses broad ridges overlooking deep valleys.

Weather can change quickly up here. Bright sun can turn into cold mist, wind, or rain as clouds move across the mountains.

You may encounter llamas, sheep, horses, and cattle moving freely near the road, with the occasional Andean condor circling above the ridgelines. Families living at these elevations practice subsistence farming under tough conditions, growing potatoes, barley, broad beans, chochos, and raising sheep and dairy animals.

Mud homes, cooking fires, stone walls, livestock, and tiny fields are part of daily life here. In some homes, guinea pigs are still raised indoors as both food and part of traditional household life in the cold highlands.

Nothing out here has been arranged for visitors. You are riding through communities that have adapted to one of the most demanding environments in Ecuador.

The road begins a long descent through tight dirt switchbacks toward Angamarca. Horses and llamas remain common transportation here, and surrounding farms send their produce into town for the local market.

Angamarca sits deep in the mountains, separated from Ecuador’s main highways by hours of rough road. Visitors are uncommon, traffic is minimal, and daily life remains closely tied to farming and the local market.

The name Angamarca is often translated as “Condor’s Nest,” which fits a town buried this deep among steep ridges and high valleys.

Your Road Book points you toward a local stop for cevichochos, a highland version of ceviche made with chochos, the protein-rich Andean lupin beans grown throughout the surrounding fields. They are mixed with citrus, tomato, onion, and herbs. It is bright, filling, and remarkably effective at convincing you that more dirt riding is a good idea.

The road leaving Angamarca clings to the edge of the mountains, with the valley falling hundreds of feet below. There can be stretches of hours without passing another vehicle.

Small river crossings, rough surfaces, cliffside roads, farms, and almost nonexistent traffic make this section feel considerably more remote than the mileage would suggest.

Out here, the absence of traffic is part of the landscape.

The elevation continues to fall as you approach El Corazón. Heavy riding layers come off, tropical vegetation returns, and sugarcane begins covering the surrounding hillsides.

The town is known for its aguardiente, a powerful sugarcane liquor produced in small local distilleries. The stills are often fired with dried sugarcane fiber, filling the air with a sweet smell that resembles burning marshmallows.

Local aguardiente comes in flavors that demonstrate somebody had entirely too much creative freedom: coconut, pineapple, chocolate, bubblegum, and plenty of others.

Your Road Book directs you to our friends Paquita and Sergio for lunch. Their farm raises the chickens served in the restaurant, roasted until the meat is tender and the skin is crisp. Maybe the dirt riding improves the appetite, but this remains some of the best roast chicken we have found anywhere.

Paquita and Sergio also produce flavored aguardiente. If you pick up a bottle, save it until the motorcycle is parked safely for the night.

After leaving El Corazón and beginning the climb back toward the Andes, your programmed route includes a stop with a local family that produces panela, the blocks of natural cane sugar used throughout Ecuador.

Fresh sugarcane juice is boiled in wide pans until it thickens, then poured into molds and allowed to harden. You can see the process, taste the warm sugar at different stages, and get a close look at how one of Ecuador’s everyday ingredients is still made by hand on a small family farm.

From here, the climb becomes steep, remote, and sustained, passing through Indigenous villages and small family farms connected by rough dirt roads.

Tropical vegetation slowly disappears as you gain elevation and return toward the colder highlands. The route switches back repeatedly across the mountains, with broad views opening behind you as El Corazón and the warmer valleys disappear below.

Eventually you reach Simiátug, a village sitting inside a broad mountain bowl surrounded by cultivated slopes. Livestock move through the streets, traditional clothing remains common, and the town serves as the commercial center for families living across the surrounding mountains.

A tremendous earthquake in 1970 destroyed much of Simiátug, including its main church. One surviving wall and the church bell remain as a stark reminder of the disaster. The town rebuilt around them while the broken wall continues overlooking the plaza and surrounding farms.

From Simiátug, your route climbs again toward a pass above 13,000 feet / 4,000 meters. Tropical vegetation disappears completely, open páramo returns, and the temperature drops quickly.

If conditions are right, you may catch one of Ecuador’s more unusual sunset effects: the sun sinking between two layers of clouds, with one cloud bank above and another filling the valleys below. It can create the strange impression that you are riding through the middle of the sky.

By late afternoon, the route descends into Salinas de Guaranda, one of Ecuador’s most unusual mountain communities.

Salinas developed its remarkable cooperative economy with important help from the Salesian order of the Catholic Church. That long Italian influence left the town with two particularly useful skills: making serious pizza and making proper espresso coffee.

At the same time, Salinas built a network of community enterprises producing cheese, chocolate, mushrooms, wool products, sausage, cured meats, and other goods using ingredients and skills developed right here in the mountains.

Your day ends at the family-run Cachi Yacu Hotel. The rooms are simple and comfortable, the views stretch across the surrounding mountains, and a large fire usually burns in the salon.

Your host, Amelia, often has hot coca tea waiting when you arrive. Salinas gets properly cold after dark, and the heavy blankets piled on the beds begin making considerably more sense around three in the morning.

Dinner is pizza, and Salinas knows exactly what it is doing.

The Italian influence from the Salesians is part of the story, but the ingredients are pure highland Ecuador: fresh local mushrooms, sausage, cured ham, vegetables, cheese, herbs, and other products made in and around the village. Add a proper wood-fired pizza and an espresso afterward, and there is a strong argument that the result is better than plenty of pizzas you will find in Italy.

We are willing to go a little further: after a full day of cliff roads, páramo, river crossings, roast chicken, panela, tropical valleys, Simiátug, and a high mountain pass, this pizza may actually taste better than pizza in Italy. The Italians have had a couple thousand years to work on the concept. Salinas has fresh mountain ingredients and hungry dirt-bike riders. Advantage Salinas.

The motorcycles are parked. If you brought a bottle of El Corazón aguardiente along for the ride, now is the appropriate time to open it.

Day 5

Salinas de Guaranda – Arrayanes – Quevedo

After yesterday’s marathon ride, this morning begins at a considerably gentler pace. Breakfast overlooks the rooftops of Salinas while the crisp mountain air reminds you why those heavy blankets were so welcome a few hours earlier.

Before getting back on the motorcycle, you’ll spend the morning discovering why Salinas de Guaranda has become one of Ecuador’s most remarkable mountain communities.

Only a few generations ago, many families here lived in deep poverty, selling milk, wool, and farm products to outside buyers for very little money. With support from the Salesian order of the Catholic Church and other development partners, the community began organizing cooperative businesses that could process those raw materials locally and keep much more of their value in the village.

What followed was not one big factory. Salinas built a network of small community businesses, each doing something different and all feeding into the same local economy.

Your Road Book guides you through some of the food cooperatives, where milk from cows grazing in the surrounding highlands is turned into cheese made right here in the village.

The cheese operation was one of the enterprises that helped establish the Salinas cooperative model. Instead of shipping raw milk away for somebody else to process and profit from, local families learned how to turn it into a higher-value product themselves.

Naturally, there will be some tasting involved. Research has standards.

One of the most interesting stops is the Salinas wool mill, where carefully maintained textile machines from the old mills of New England are still working thousands of miles from where they began their industrial lives.

Local sheep and alpaca wool passes through a series of machines as it is cleaned, prepared, carded, spun, and eventually turned into strong multi-ply yarn.

There is something wonderfully improbable about standing in a remote Andean village listening to machinery that once belonged to the textile industry of New England clattering away and doing essentially the same job it was built to do decades ago.

Nearby, the women’s knitting cooperative turns the finished yarn into sweaters, scarves, hats, rugs, blankets, and other substantial wool products made for actual cold weather and actual use.

These are not disposable souvenir-shop sweaters. The wool goods made in Salinas are heavy, practical, and built to last for years.

Between the machinery, the locally sourced wool, and the finished products being sold within a few hundred yards of one another, you can see exactly what the cooperative system was designed to accomplish: take a resource already produced here and keep as much of its value in the community as possible.

Then you’ll visit one of the more unexpected businesses in Salinas: the soccer ball workshop.

The balls are still produced by hand using natural latex, molds, ovens, and a surprising amount of manual work. It is another small-scale operation that has created useful employment from skills developed right here in the village.

Ecuador Freedom regularly buys balls here to carry farther into the mountains and distribute to rural schools through our Ride for a Purpose program.

A soccer ball made by one cooperative in Salinas can end up being kicked around a schoolyard in another isolated Andean community many miles away. That is a pretty good supply chain.

Your walking route also takes you past some of the town’s other cooperative businesses, including ham and sausage curing, chocolate production, fruit drying, mushrooms, and other locally produced foods.

Nearly every doorway seems to reveal another small enterprise. Cheese in one building, yarn in another, chocolate down the road, cured meats around the corner. The interesting part is how all of them connect back to the same basic idea: use local resources, teach useful skills, create finished products here, and keep people employed in the community.

And then there is the resource that started the whole story long before cheese, chocolate, wool mills, or soccer balls existed: salt.

The name Salinas comes from natural salt springs that emerge from the surrounding mountains. People have harvested salt here for centuries, long before refrigeration made food preservation easy.

Salt was essential for preserving meat and other foods and was an extremely valuable commodity in everyday Andean life. These springs gave this isolated mountain settlement economic importance long before either the modern cooperative system or the roads you use today existed.

Your Road Book points you toward the springs so you can see the natural resource that first gave Salinas its reason to exist.

Eventually it is time to get back on the motorcycle. You have spent the morning looking at what Salinas produces; now you’ll ride out through the country that produces it.

Your GPS route heads into deep backcountry and begins one of the most beautiful descents of the tour, following mountain roads along steep slopes with enormous views across clouds, valleys, and eventually the coastal plains far below.

Small family farms line the way, with pigs, donkeys, cows, sheep, and chickens wandering near the road as though they have more right to be there than you do. In many places, they probably do.

You’ll pass through tiny high Andean communities including Arrayanes, a hamlet consisting of only a handful of homes where local families make their own mountain cheese.

Your Road Book leads you to a small local operation where you can taste a savory, ripened cheese produced right here. Other nearby communities specialize in different varieties, including Parmesan-style and mozzarella-style cheeses made from milk produced by healthy dairy cattle grazing these cold green mountains.

There are no industrial-scale dairies hiding behind the scenery. In many cases, what you are eating was made a short distance from the cows that produced the milk.

The people in these villages are usually warm and curious, partly because motorcycle travelers are among the relatively few outsiders who ever pass through.

These are also some of the communities connected with our Ride for a Purpose program, which provides soccer balls, school supplies, and other useful items to remote schools along our routes.

It is another reminder that these roads connect real communities rather than simply giving you somewhere interesting to ride a motorcycle.

As the descent continues, the climate starts changing rapidly. Cold highland air scented with grass, wood smoke, and dairy farms gives way to warmer air, wet earth, citrus, and tropical vegetation.

Lemon, orange, and mandarin trees begin appearing along the road. Clear rivers cut through the valleys, vegetation grows thicker, and every thousand feet of descent seems to introduce another group of plants that could not survive where you ate breakfast.

By now you can start putting away some of those warm layers. They have completed their shift.

By the time you reach the lowlands, you are riding through a completely different agricultural world.

Cacao, bananas, teak, palm, citrus, and tropical fruit replace potatoes, pasture, and dairy cattle. The roads become warmer and greener as they roll through enormous agricultural areas fed by the rich soil and heavy rainfall of Ecuador’s coastal lowlands.

Your route takes you through farming country where you can get a close look at the crops that drive the regional economy and at the people growing them.

Once again, the remarkable part is how quickly Ecuador changes. This morning you were drinking coffee in an Andean village at roughly 11,500 feet, surrounded by wool, cheese, cold air, and wood smoke. A few hours later you are riding beside cacao and banana plants in tropical heat.

By late afternoon, your route brings you into Quevedo and the Hotel Olímpico. Checking into Hotel Olímpico is checking straight into the summer of 1979. Earth-tone tile, dark wood, geometric patterns, and an Olympic-size swimming pool from an era when Olympic decathlon champions graced cereal boxes, running shorts were alarmingly short, tube socks climbed halfway to the knees, and hotels still believed personality mattered more than corporate branding.

The staff still treats guests the old-fashioned way — polite, attentive, genuinely friendly, and always ready to help you have a good time. The rooms are spacious, the air conditioning is excellent after a warm afternoon in Los Ríos, and the enormous swimming pool comes complete with waterslides and a towering high dive from the days before lawyers started designing swimming pools.

There is time to cool off with a swim, relax beside the pool with a cold beer, and clean up before heading out for one of the best dinners of the tour.

Tonight, your Road Book sends you to the best chifa restaurant in Ecuador: Chifa Jade.

Chifa is Ecuador’s distinctive Chinese-Ecuadorian cuisine, born after Cantonese immigrants began settling around Quevedo and other parts of the country in the early 20th century. Many became involved in the region’s agriculture, food processing, transportation, shipping, and commerce. Over generations, their cooking blended with Ecuador’s seafood, tropical produce, herbs, peppers, and other local ingredients to create something with unmistakably Chinese roots but a character all its own.

The menu at Chifa Jade is built around the kind of food you want after a full day on the motorcycle: lacquered roast duck with crisp skin, Pacific prawns and shrimp rushed from wok to plate, fragrant fried rice, hand-tossed noodles, pork, chicken, and vegetables that still have some snap to them.

The sauces bring the tropics into the meal — tamarind, pineapple, ginger, citrus, and a measured kick of ají — creating combinations you will not find in a Chinese restaurant anywhere else.

Order several dishes and share them if you are riding with friends, or attack the menu according to your own priorities if you are traveling solo. Either way, this is the kind of meal that makes you rethink what Chinese food can be.

You will still be talking about dinner at Chifa Jade long after you have forgotten how many miles you rode that day.

Day 6

Quevedo – Pucuyacu – Sigchos – Isinliví – Quito

The final day starts in the hot agricultural lowlands of Quevedo, and by the time you are finished, you’ll have hauled yourself and the motorcycle all the way back into the high Andes.

If you were hoping Day 6 would be a ceremonial victory lap back to Quito, the route has other plans.

There is still work to do.

Your programmed GPS route begins through plantations of palm, banana, cacao, and tropical fruit before the road starts nosing its way toward coffee country.

The morning air is heavy and humid, carrying the smell of wet soil, fermenting fruit, sun-warmed leaves, and cacao drying near farms and roadside homes.

Enjoy the warmth while you have it.

You are about to spend most of the day climbing out of it.

The route passes through enormous plantations of gmelina, also known as white teak. These fast-growing trees thrive in Ecuador’s equatorial climate and can reach harvestable size in roughly eight years.

The wood is used for furniture, shipping pallets, construction materials, and plenty of other practical products that will never make the cover of an adventure-motorcycle magazine.

Riding through the plantations is another matter. Tall straight trunks stand in long rows, filtered sunlight cuts through the leaves, and the dirt road disappears beneath a green canopy. For a while, it looks as though somebody planted an entire forest specifically so you could ride a motorcycle through the middle of it.

As you gain elevation, the route passes through small working towns and villages including Guasaganda and Pucuyacu. Dairy farms, cattle, roadside fruit stands, little markets, and cooler air begin marking the transition between Ecuador’s tropical lowlands and the mountains.

Pucuyacu often has an animal and farmers’ market, and the town square is a good place for some fresh fruit and a quick snack.

That is also about where anybody who thought the final day might be easy gets corrected.

Outside Pucuyacu, your route crosses a river and then points uphill.

And we mean uphill.

You’ll gain roughly 6,000 feet in only a few miles on one of the steepest and roughest climbs of the entire tour. The road becomes narrow, rocky, uneven, and steep enough that momentum stops being an abstract concept and becomes something you suddenly care about very much.

Line choice matters. Looking where you want the motorcycle to go matters. Keeping the bike moving matters.

Staring at the rock you do not want to hit remains a terrible strategy.

This is one of the toughest stretches of the entire six-day route, which is exactly why it comes now. By Day 6, you have already spent five days getting used to the motorcycle, loose surfaces, mud, rocks, altitude, switchbacks, and Ecuador’s occasional habit of turning a perfectly respectable road into something entirely different after a hard rain.

The switchbacks keep coming. The temperature drops. Every time you look back, the tropical lowlands are another thousand feet farther below you.

Eventually, the road drags you all the way back into highland country and toward Sigchos, reconnecting with the famous Quilotoa Loop.

You passed through this region earlier in the tour. Now you are arriving from a completely different direction after crossing a good chunk of western Ecuador the difficult way.

From here, your route rolls through highland farms on a mixture of dirt and old cobblestone roads, with broad views across deep valleys, cultivated slopes, and mountain ridges.

By now the rhythm is familiar. Stand when it helps. Relax the grip. Let the motorcycle move underneath you. Keep rolling.

In Isinliví, your Road Book takes you to our friends at the Don Bosco school, where skilled craftsmen teach local young people traditional woodworking and furniture making.

These are not little souvenir projects designed to keep tourists busy for twenty minutes. Students learn how to select wood, cut it properly, shape it, create strong joints, carve details, finish surfaces, and build furniture designed to last for generations.

Good wood. Sharp tools. Solid joinery. Patience. No shortcuts.

There is something deeply satisfying about seeing young people learn a serious trade from craftsmen who still care about doing the job correctly.

Ecuador Freedom has known the people here for years, and we regularly bring supplies for students and rural schools through our Ride for a Purpose program.

The route may be built around motorcycles, but stops like Isinliví are part of why we keep returning to these same roads year after year.

From Isinliví, your GPS route climbs again toward Guingopana Pass, crossing high Andean country at around 13,400 feet / 4,085 meters.

The landscape becomes wide open and exposed, with enormous views over deep valleys and surrounding mountains. When the weather opens, several of Ecuador’s great volcanoes can appear across the horizon.

When it does not, you get wind, fog, cold fingers, and a useful reminder that the Andes are under no obligation to cooperate with your vacation plans.

From the pass comes a twisting cobblestone descent through highland farms toward Toacaso.

Cobblestones have a special talent for making a perfectly good motorcycle feel as though somebody loosened every bolt while you were stopped for lunch.

Relax the grip and let the motorcycle do its job.

The country up here is wide open, with farms clinging to steep hillsides and enormous views across the Andes. It is difficult to believe you woke up this morning in the tropical heat of Quevedo.

Six days into the trip, none of this feels particularly strange anymore.

Around the next bend might be cobblestone, loose rock, mud, cattle, a dog asleep in the middle of the road, or a view good enough to make you pull over and forget for a minute how tired you are.

After six days of dirt, mud, river crossings, rocks, ruts, switchbacks, and enough elevation change to scramble your internal thermostat, the route makes one of its stranger transitions: a stop at a working rose plantation.

Ecuador produces some of the best roses in the world. Strong equatorial sunlight, cool highland temperatures, rich volcanic soil, and elevation combine to produce exceptionally long stems, huge blooms, and intense colors.

You’ll see how the roses are grown, cut, graded, packed, and prepared for shipment around the world. You may also get to try some of the less obvious products people have learned to make from roses.

After everything the last six days have thrown at you, stopping to smell the roses is no longer a figure of speech.

You might as well do it.

Then your route brings you to Hacienda La Ciénega, one of Ecuador’s oldest surviving haciendas. Construction began in the late 1600s, and the place still has massive stone walls, heavy timber, old courtyards, hand-carved doors, fireplaces, and rooms filled with antiques.

After clawing your way up roughly 6,000 vertical feet from the tropical lowlands, walking through the front door is quite a change of scenery.

La Ciénega has also seen some serious history pass through those doors. Members of the French Geodesic Mission, including Charles-Marie de La Condamine, stayed here during their work in Ecuador in the 18th century. They came to the Equator to help settle one of the great scientific questions of their age: the true shape of the Earth.

In 1802, Alexander von Humboldt also stayed at La Ciénega while exploring the Ecuadorian Andes with Aimé Bonpland and Carlos Montúfar.

Humboldt studied volcanoes, plants, geography, climate, and the way the natural world changes with elevation. His work in this region helped shape modern ideas about ecology and the connections among climate, altitude, vegetation, and landscape.

Your Road Book directs you here for lunch, so when you walk through the stone corridors and sit down to eat, you are dining in a building that has watched scientists, explorers, landowners, farmers, politicians, and travelers pass through for more than three centuries.

The walls are thick. The fireplaces are real. The furniture has some weight to it.

After wrestling a motorcycle up 6,000 vertical feet earlier in the day, eating a proper Andean lunch inside a 17th-century hacienda feels almost indecently civilized.

From La Ciénega, the final stretch joins the Avenue of Volcanoes and carries you north toward Quito.

On a clear afternoon, some of Ecuador’s great volcanic peaks rise around you, including Cotopaxi, one of the tallest active volcanoes on Earth.

Dirt gradually gives way to pavement. Traffic starts appearing again. Buildings begin closing in around the road.

Six days ago, all of that felt normal.

Now it feels a little strange.

By the time you roll back into Ecuador Freedom’s headquarters in Quito, you will have crossed cloudforest, tropical rainforest, high páramo, agricultural lowlands, remote Indigenous communities, plantations, rivers, cobblestones, mud, rocks, cliff roads, volcanic passes, workshops, farms, and enough forgotten dirt roads to understand why we have spent years putting this route together.

Park the motorcycle, peel off the riding gear, and take advantage of the hot shower, hot tub, and Freedom Riders’ Lounge before heading out for dinner, another night in Quito, or the next part of your trip.

Six days earlier, you left Quito with a clean motorcycle and clean riding gear.

You probably will not return with either.

This self-guided off-road motorcycle adventure begins at Ecuador Freedom Bike Rental’s headquarters in Quito’s secure and convenient La Carolina neighborhood. We strongly encourage you to arrive in Quito one or two days before your tour begins. This gives you time to adjust to the altitude, explore the city, and stop by our headquarters to complete your paperwork and, whenever possible, take care of your detailed pre-ride briefing before Day 1. We ask that you visit us in the afternoon whenever possible, since our mornings are generally focused on preparing and assisting riders who are departing that day. Contact us before your arrival and we’ll arrange a convenient time for your paperwork and briefing. Completing these details in advance means that when Day 1 arrives, your motorcycle is ready, your route is familiar, and you can get down to the important business of riding.

Orientation, Motorcycles & Support

Before departure, you’ll receive a detailed route and riding briefing from an experienced Ecuador Freedom guide who knows this route firsthand. The orientation covers Ecuadorian traffic laws, local driving customs, road courtesies, safety procedures, the riding conditions you can expect, and the way the route changes as it moves between the high Andes, cloudforest, agricultural lowlands, and remote backcountry.

Riding in Ecuador has its own rhythm, particularly on narrow rural roads where motorcycles may share the route with livestock, farm vehicles, pedestrians, dogs, horses, and local traffic. The briefing is designed to help you understand that rhythm before you leave Quito so you can ride predictably, confidently, and comfortably from the first mile.

You’ll be provided with the off-road-capable adventure motorcycle of your choice, prepared with suitable tires, protective equipment, a waterproof luggage system, and an optional tank bag. Before leaving Quito, the motorcycle will be inspected with you so that you understand its controls, luggage, accessories, and any model-specific features.

Your motorcycle will also be equipped with a programmed Garmin GPS containing the routes you’ll follow during the tour. You’ll receive a detailed Road Book with information about the day’s riding, important turns, fuel stops, restaurants, hotels, cultural stops, points of interest, and other information you’ll need along the way.

You’ll also carry a local mobile phone, and your motorcycle will be monitored by our Quito team during riding days. If you encounter a problem, have a question about the route, need mechanical assistance, or need help communicating with somebody along the way, Ecuador Freedom provides 24-hour support throughout your trip.

The idea is simple: you get the independence and satisfaction of riding Ecuador on your own, while still having a local team behind you when you need us.

The Route & Riding Experience

The route you’ll follow over the next six days is the result of years spent scouting, riding, testing, and refining Ecuador’s remote backroads in a wide range of weather and surface conditions. Your programmed GPS route and Road Book guide you through the same roads, villages, workshops, farms, cultural stops, and accommodations used on our guided version of the tour.

This tour is mostly unpaved and follows natural, unimproved dirt roads rather than maintained gravel highways. Many sections are narrow, remote, and single-lane, with very little traffic. You should expect dirt, mud, loose rock, embedded stone, ruts, ancient cobblestone, steep climbs, rough descents, shallow water crossings, and rapid changes in weather and elevation. The roads are selected for their scenery, remoteness, cultural importance, and riding character rather than convenience or speed.

Some sections are demanding. You’ll encounter rocky climbs where momentum matters, steep switchbacks where line choice matters, slippery cobblestones, muddy sections after rain, and long riding days that require concentration and endurance.

Your GPS tells you where to go, but the responsibility for reading the terrain remains yours. Surface conditions can change after heavy rain, road work, erosion, landslides, agricultural traffic, or simply another season in the Andes. Ride within your ability, look well ahead, choose your line, and give yourself room to react to whatever is around the next corner.

The route is also much more than a track on a GPS. Your Road Book directs you to people and places we have come to know through years of riding these roads: farmers, artisans, cheese makers, leather workers, coffee growers, woodworking schools, rural families, community businesses, and restaurants that most visitors to Ecuador will never find on their own.

Those stops are a major part of the experience. You are not simply riding past rural Ecuador. You’ll be getting off the motorcycle, meeting people, tasting what they produce, seeing how they work, and learning something about the places the road takes you through.

Participants are also encouraged to support our Ride for a Purpose program, developed in association with Pack for a Purpose. Riders may bring requested school supplies, sports equipment, art materials, and other useful items for children in remote communities visited along our routes. Please review the program page before packing for the current list of requested items.

How Our Difficulty Rating Works

This tour carries a 5/5 Challenging rating in Ecuador Freedom’s difficulty system. That rating is a comparison with the other motorcycle tours we offer. It does not mean we are claiming this is the most difficult motorcycle tour in Ecuador, South America, or the world.

Our rating system is designed to help you compare our own tours with one another. A 5/5 route includes more demanding off-road terrain, longer riding days, steeper climbs, rougher surfaces, and more sustained concentration than our lower-rated tours.

If you are choosing between several Ecuador Freedom routes, the rating gives you a practical idea of where this tour sits within our lineup. On this one, you should arrive with solid off-road riding experience, reasonable physical conditioning, and the ability to remain comfortable and focused during long days on changing terrain.

Navigation & Route Independence

This is a self-guided tour, which means there is no guide riding in front of you and no group schedule dictating every turn. Your Garmin GPS contains the programmed route, while the Road Book gives you the information and context that a GPS screen cannot.

The system allows you to concentrate on riding instead of spending the day building routes on your phone, deciphering road signs, or wondering which dirt road disappearing over the mountain is the one you actually want.

We have already done that work.

Years of scouting have gone into identifying the roads that connect the best riding with the communities, landscapes, food, accommodations, and cultural stops that make this tour what it is. You get the independence of a solo motorcycle trip without having to spend weeks figuring out where the worthwhile roads actually go.

Your back-office support team also knows where you are during the riding day through the motorcycle’s tracking system. If something unusual happens, you are not trying to explain your location by saying you are “somewhere past the cows near the mountain.” We can see where you are and help from there.

Meals & Tour Expenses

Meals on the self-guided tour work differently from the guided version.

Breakfast is included with your accommodations. During the riding day, you are responsible for your own lunch. Your Road Book includes information about good places to eat along the route, towns where food is available, and local specialties worth trying, but you choose where and what you want to eat.

Dinner is included on nights when there are no practical dining options within walking distance of the overnight accommodation. In those locations, we make sure you are fed rather than leaving you to go hunting for dinner after a long day of riding.

When you stay in towns such as Salinas de Guaranda or Quevedo, where there are good restaurants nearby, dinner is not included. Instead, your Road Book provides detailed recommendations on where to eat and what is worth ordering. That includes places such as the pizza restaurants in Salinas and the best chifa in Ecuador at Chifa Jade in Quevedo.

You should carry some cash for lunches, dinners that are not included, gratuities, alcoholic beverages, snacks, souvenirs, personal purchases, and small rural businesses that may not accept cards.

Accommodations

Throughout the tour, you’ll stay in carefully selected hotels, lodges, haciendas, and family-owned inns chosen for comfort, character, location, secure motorcycle parking, and practical access to the route.

In some of the remote parts of Ecuador, there may only be a handful of suitable accommodations. We choose the best properties available along the route, and because Ecuador Freedom has been working with many of these hotels for years, we are often able to secure the best rooms available for our riders.

We look for comfortable beds, reliable hot water, secure motorcycle parking, good service, useful locations, and places with enough character to add something to the trip. After a full day of dirt roads, mud, rocks, high passes, and water crossings, a hot shower and a comfortable room matter considerably more than corporate uniformity.

Details, photographs, and links for the scheduled accommodations are provided elsewhere on this page.

Ecuador Freedom reserves the right to substitute a property of comparable quality when required by availability, weather, road access, or other operational considerations. You will be notified whenever a change is necessary.

Weather & Temperatures

Ecuador’s general weather patterns remain fairly consistent throughout the year, but the elevation changes on this route are dramatic enough to produce completely different conditions within a single riding day. You may begin in warm, humid lowlands where temperatures approach 90°F / 32°C and later climb into the high Andes, where temperatures can fall into the 30s°F / 0–4°C.

Passing showers are common in the highlands, although a complete day of rain is unusual. Longer periods of rain are more likely on the western slopes of the Andes during March, April, and early May. Rain can make the unpaved sections significantly more demanding by adding mud, standing water, slippery stone, deeper ruts, and reduced visibility.

Dressing in layers is strongly recommended. Waterproof outerwear, warm gloves, breathable protective gear, moisture-wicking base layers, and quick-drying clothing will make the ride far more comfortable. Our detailed Weather in Ecuador Guide explains regional conditions, seasonal patterns, altitude-related temperature changes, and what riders should expect throughout the country.

Packing, Preparation & Rider Information

Once you book the tour, Ecuador Freedom sends you a detailed pre-trip information package to help you prepare. This includes a recommended packing list, information about luggage, riding gear, documents, weather, altitude, physical preparation, motorcycle equipment, and practical details for your arrival in Ecuador.

Because you will be carrying your own personal gear on the motorcycle, packing light matters. Bringing less makes the motorcycle easier to handle on steep climbs, rough descents, mud, rocks, and water crossings. The supplied waterproof luggage gives you useful carrying capacity without turning the motorcycle into a moving household.

We also recommend reviewing our complete Motorcycle Tour Packing Guide, which covers riding gear, layering, waterproof clothing, electronics, personal items, and other considerations for Ecuador’s varied climates and elevations.

Tour participants also receive an exclusive 20% discount on Klim riding gear. This special Ecuador Freedom customer discount is not available through normal retail stores and can be especially useful if you need to upgrade jackets, pants, gloves, or other riding equipment before the trip.

No knowledge of Spanish is required. Your Road Book contains the information you need for the programmed stops, and our bilingual team remains available by phone throughout the trip to assist with communication, accommodations, mechanical issues, local interactions, or anything else that needs sorting out.

The better prepared you are, the more you’ll enjoy the changing weather, varied terrain, altitude, cultural encounters, and inevitable backcountry surprises. The route is demanding enough to feel earned, while the programmed navigation, Road Book, tracking system, and back-office support allow you to concentrate on the reason you came here in the first place: riding across rural Ecuador on one of the best off-road motorcycle routes in South America.

After the Ride

When you return to Quito, you’ll have access to the Freedom Riders’ Lounge™, including the honor bar, jacuzzi, hot showers, luggage storage, and a comfortable place to unwind.

After six days of mud, rocks, river crossings, tropical heat, cold páramo, cobblestones, plantations, high passes, and whatever Ecuador has added to your riding gear along the way, the hot shower and jacuzzi usually require very little explanation.

Ecuador Freedom staff can also assist with hotel arrangements, airport transportation, onward travel plans, local recommendations, or your next destination in Ecuador. More information about our facilities and location is available on the Ecuador Freedom headquarters page.

• Unlimited-mileage motorcycle rental
• Programmed Garmin GPS with the complete 6-day OFFROAD Ecuador ADVenture route
• Comprehensive pre-ride briefing conducted by one of our experienced guides who knows the route firsthand and has ridden it many times
• Ecuador Freedom Road Book with detailed daily route sheets, maps showing the general locations of important points of interest, historical and cultural background, restaurant recommendations, practical information, and useful contact details
• Local cell phone for use during the tour
• Back-office monitoring of your progress during riding days
• 24-hour Ecuador Freedom support while you are on the tour
• Installed luggage system on the motorcycle
• Luggage storage and locker use while riding
• Single-occupancy hotel rooms — your own private room each night at no extra charge
• Breakfast each morning
• Dinner at Cabañas del Lago
• Dinner at Séptimo Paraíso
• Dinner at Mama Hilda’s in Chugchilán
• Rose plantation tour
• Tolls on the Pan-American Highway
• Detailed pre-tour preparation information, including a packing list, riding-gear guidance, luggage information, weather and altitude information, and other trip-planning materials
• Pre-tour 20% discount on high-quality riding gear purchased through the Klim website — an exclusive Ecuador Freedom tour-rider discount not available through normal retail stores
• Souvenir Ecuador Freedom T-shirt
• Souvenir tour decal
• VIP access to the Freedom Riders’ Lounge™ with hot shower, jacuzzi, luggage storage, and honor bar

• 100% refundable motorcycle security deposit to cover any damage to the rental motorcycle
• Airfare to and from Ecuador
• Airport transfers before or after the tour
• Hotel accommodations in Quito before and after the tour
• Gasoline or Diesel
• Meals not specifically listed as included
• Tours, activities, and entrance fees not specifically listed as included
• Souvenirs and personal purchases
• Alcoholic beverages
• Trip cancellation, medical, and emergency evacuation insurance
• Gratuities for Ecuador Freedom preparation staff who assist with your briefing, motorcycle preparation, departure, and return, at your discretion
• Gratuities for hotel staff, restaurant staff, and tour or activity providers

There are no taxes when you purchase a tour package (non-residents only).

Want to spend more time exploring Ecuador? You can extend the Andes Twist with any of the options below. Each extension has a fixed add-on price that includes the additional motorcycle rental days along with the accommodations, meals, activities, and other items indicated in the individual extension description.

The extension price is the same regardless of which motorcycle you choose, which can make these additions especially attractive if you are riding one of our higher-priced motorcycles.

You do not need to decide on an extension before you begin the booking process. During online booking, you can review the available extensions, select the ones you want to add, and see your updated total price before completing your reservation.

Book your self-guided Andes Twist online in just a few steps.

You can book this tour solo or with a group of friends, and self-guided departures are available throughout the year except on dates when we already have a Guided Andes Twist departure scheduled.

Our reservation system provides up-to-date availability and pricing. Simply enter your preferred dates, select your motorcycle, and choose any tour extensions you would like to add. The system will calculate the exact price of your tour based on your selections.

You can also extend your trip with any of the tour extensions listed below. Add them during the booking process and the reservation system will automatically include them in your itinerary and calculate the updated tour price.

If more than one passenger will be traveling in a 4x4 support vehicle, please contact us so we can arrange the appropriate room-sharing configuration and provide accurate pricing.

We can also customize the Andes Twist if you would like to modify the itinerary, add extra days, combine it with other destinations, or create a more personalized version of the tour. Contact us and we can discuss the possibilities with you.

Our booking system asks for an identification number as part of the reservation process. You may use your passport number, driver’s license number, national ID number, or another government-issued identification number.

If you prefer not to enter that information online, or if you have any difficulty completing the payment, just contact us. We can take your credit card information over the phone and process the payment for you.

You may also select the “Request PayPal Invoice” option at checkout. We will send you a PayPal invoice that can be paid with any major credit card. No PayPal account is required.

If you prefer to pay by bank transfer, we can provide our banking instructions upon request.

If you have any questions, need help configuring a booking for several riders or passengers, or would like to discuss a customized version of the tour, please email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or click the chat button below.