Gap year & Travel News

2011 has been an exciting year for the Leap in Ecuador, seeing the launch of a fantastic new conservation and community project in the Galapagos,  intern placements in the capital Quito and strengthening our working relationship with the mysterious Shaman Tsa’chila communities in the rainforest. We sent 36 lovely Leapers to Ecuador in 2011 and [...]

This year James Duddy took The Leap to Ecuador and had the time of his life! Now he’s made a film of his trip so that he’ll never forget the good times and can share them with others too…. If you’re planning a gap year, or in the middle of one right now but stuck [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

Hola from the Ecuador’s Andes Mountains! Another week of volunteering has flown by in Chilcabamba. The food continues to be incredible but unfortunately the weather has been very wet. Sick of not being able to work in the afternoons due to daily showers we have changed our work schedule to longer hours in the morning [...]

Update from our Ecuador Leapers: The first week of volunteering  in the Andes has gone really well. Everyone is settled into our comfortable homestay and the food is great. This week we seem to have done more work destroying than actually building! Much of the land arouend the village has become overgrown with eucalyptus spouts [...]

Hola! The teams first week in Chilcapamba (the community in the Andes) went very well.  We spent the week building a new house for an elderly woman in the community, as the wall of her old house had caved in and it was unsafe for her to live in.  We spent one day removing the [...]

We arrived in Chilcapamba last Wednesday after a very eventful bus journey during which Emily very nearly wet herself – apparently some bus drivers in Ecuador lock the toilet door and pretend they don´t have the key just so they don´t have to maintain the toilet! Emily wasn´t impressed and literally had a plastic bottle [...]