Gap year & Travel News

Hi September team!! My name is Jemma Swan, I’m 22 years old and from a rural town in Australia. I am currently completing my Bachelor of Arts in International Studies while doing an internship with the Yanapuma Foundation. I have been living in Quito since the end of June and last semester I spent studying [...]

Hi All, The Leap Ecuador group just spent yet another fabulous week in Los Naranjos getting to know the families who takes care of us even better. The girls have been helping cook dinner and the boys have become unofficial landscape designers under the direction of the three youngest girls. This week we helped finish construction [...]

Hola from Los Noranjos, Ecuador! Life continues to be interesting as we finish our first week of volunteering in the rainforest. We’re living in the smallest of the seven Tsachila communities, also known as los Colorados for their bright red hair, dyed with a berry called achote. Our wood plank cabin is open air with [...]

Hi all! The past week was packed as we took on the project of renovating the local play-park which had fallen into bad condition and was unsafe for children to play on. With much sawing, hammering, chiseling, and a new paint job, we recreated it to look and feel brand new! We added on a [...]

Hola from the Andes in Ecuador! We just finished week two living at 14,000ft altitude in Chilcapamba (starting to feel acclimatized now!) and are taking the weekend off in Ibarra, a beautiful small city just a short bus ride away from our worksite. This week´s activities took the form of clearing a canal used for [...]

Hello from the heady heights of the Andes Mountains! We kickstarted the Leapers first week with a whirlwind orientation to Ecuadorian culture and a crash course in Spanish, courtesy of the Yanapuma Foundation. Then on Wednesday, we left Quito and made our way into the Andes by bus, finally arriving in the small town of [...]

Hi Guy and everyone else in the office, We finished up the cabin! Yeah! And just in time for some tourists who stayed the night in the cabin the same day we finished it. This last week has been a whirlwind of work with hammers flying (not literally, don’t worry) and saws cutting, as well [...]

Last week, hot on the heels of the Ecuador Team, The Leap’s Alice trotted off to South America to see the volunteers in action! It was a frantic 7 days in Ecuador whizzing between Quito (where she was visiting some AMAZING new projects for 2012), the Andes community of Chilcapamba and the Tsachila tribe in [...]

Izzy Talks began her journey out in beautiful Ecuador this January with one of our Leap teams, spending 3 weeks high up in The Andes, 3 weeks deep in the Amazon Rainforest and 3 weeks at the coast for the ultimate Latin American experience! Apart from wanting to experience the amazing environments, people and culture [...]

The Leap Team 2, have left the coast and are now in Ecuador’s Andes Mountains, was off to a great start on Tuesday as they arrived to the quiet community of Chilcapamba. We worked hard this week painting a nursery and have just recently completed a set of mountains on one wall as well as [...]