South America Motorcycle Tours: Why Ecuador Should Be on Your Bucket List

When riders start talking about motorcycle tours in South America, the same names usually come up first: Patagonia, Chile, Argentina, and Peru.

We thought the same thing when we left New York on motorcycles and pointed them toward Ushuaia. We wanted to ride the legendary places, cross the borders, see the Andes, and find out whether the destinations we had spent years reading about lived up to the hype.

We rode through Central America, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Argentina before eventually reaching Patagonia: huge empty spaces, violent winds, glacial lakes, and snow-covered Andean peaks.

Riding Motorcycles in Patagonia

We loved Patagonia. There’s a reason riders from all over the world want to get there.

The roads stretch toward the horizon. The wind can beat the hell out of you. The mountains get bigger as you head south, and there are places where it genuinely feels like you have ridden to the edge of the continent.

But as spectacular as it was, we started noticing something.

It felt familiar.

The pampas, glacial lakes, empty roads, and snow-covered mountains reminded us a lot of Alaska and northern Canada. If you come from North America and have already ridden those places, Patagonia can sometimes feel like a bigger, windier cousin of terrain you already know.

We wanted something different.

We wanted a place where the scenery, people, food, climate, roads, and riding could change completely in the space of a single day.

Machu Picchu by Motorcycle

Peru is another heavyweight of South American motorcycle travel, and for good reason.

Riding toward Machu Picchu has become almost a rite of passage for adventure riders. The mountain roads are spectacular, the cultural history is enormous, and Peru delivers the kind of scenery that makes you stop the motorcycle just to stare at it.

We were blown away by Peru.

But we were also looking for something beyond a great place to visit. We were trying to find a country where we could live, keep exploring, and eventually build a motorcycle touring company.

We needed somewhere that could keep surprising us year after year.

Looking for Our Own El Dorado

Somewhere along the way, our trip across the Americas turned into a search.

We wanted one country that packed as much of South America as possible into a rideable area.

Pacific coast.

High Andes.

Amazon rainforest.

Volcanoes, jungle, beaches, dirt roads, mountain twisties, tiny villages, Indigenous markets, old haciendas, wild backcountry, and enough good food to make stopping for lunch part of the adventure.

We wanted good paved roads when we wanted pavement and endless dirt when we didn’t.

We wanted places where you could spend the night in a centuries-old hacienda, a small family-run hotel, or a jungle lodge buried in the rainforest.

We wanted great local food, roadside restaurants, markets, festivals, remote communities, and roads that kept giving us reasons to wonder where the hell they went.

Most importantly, we wanted somewhere we could explore for years without getting bored.

After riding Chile and Argentina, traveling through Brazil and Paraguay, and exploring Peru and Bolivia, we realized we had already ridden through exactly the place we were looking for.

Ecuador.

Why Ecuador Works So Well on a Motorcycle

Ecuador looks small on a map.

That is one of its biggest advantages.

You don’t have to burn through hundreds of miles of empty highway just to get from one great riding area to another. The Pacific coast, Andes, cloudforest, and Amazon are packed surprisingly close together.

That means a motorcycle trip can change completely in a matter of hours.

You can wake up high in the Andes, carve through fast pavement around volcanic valleys, drop onto rough mountain roads, cross stretches of loose gravel and broken cobblestone, descend through wet cloudforest tracks, and finish the day surrounded by tropical vegetation.

The following day can be completely different again.

Because Ecuador sits on the equator and contains enormous changes in elevation, riding conditions depend much more on where you are than on whether the calendar says summer or winter. Our Ecuador weather guide explains what riders can expect in the country's different regions.

Whether you want a fully guided motorcycle tour, one of our self-guided tours, or simply a motorcycle and a set of keys, Ecuador gives you an enormous amount of riding without requiring enormous daily mileage.

More Riding, Less Highway Grinding

There is a certain pride among long-distance riders in knocking out monster mileage days.

Sometimes you have to.

But riding eight hundred miles just to reach the interesting part isn't our idea of a great motorcycle tour.

In Ecuador, ten or twelve days gives you enough time to experience an astonishing amount of the country without turning every day into an endurance test.

You can ride the Avenue of the Volcanoes, explore tiny coastal towns, cross high Andean passes, disappear onto backcountry dirt roads, and descend into the Amazon.

And because the distances are manageable, you still have time to get off the motorcycle.

Eat something you’ve never tried. Walk through a market. Soak in hot springs. Hike to a waterfall. Tube down an Amazon river. Visit a cacao farm. Watch llamas wandering around at altitude. Meet the people who actually live along the roads you’re riding.

That matters to us.

Motorcycle travel shouldn't be reduced to watching an entire country disappear through your visor at 70 miles per hour.

A Continent’s Worth of Riding in One Small Country

If you have already ridden Patagonia, crossed Alaska, or checked Machu Picchu off the list, Ecuador gives you something different.

Patagonia gives you scale and remoteness. Peru gives you legendary landmarks and huge mountain landscapes. Ecuador gives you density: dramatic changes in terrain, climate, culture, and riding packed into distances that let you experience more without spending half the trip grinding down highways.

If dirt is what you came for, there are enough mountain tracks, volcanic gravel roads, washed-out backcountry routes, muddy cloudforest trails, river crossings, and forgotten roads here to keep you busy for a very long time.

And if this is your first motorcycle trip in South America, Ecuador gives you an enormous variety of terrain and culture without requiring months on the road.

We came to Ecuador looking for a place where we could build Ecuador Freedom and keep exploring for years.

We found it.

More than a decade later, we’re still finding roads we haven’t ridden, villages we haven’t visited, and places that make us stop the bikes, shut off the engines, and just look around.

For riders who think they’ve already seen South America, that’s the point.

Court Rand is the founder and co-owner of Ecuador Freedom. Sylvain Gallea now leads the design and organization of our premium motorcycle tours in Ecuador, with Court continuing to contribute his experience, ideas, and knowledge of the country gained since 2009.