Gap year & Travel News

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Hola from the Pacific Coast of Ecuador! Three weeks in and the team (Rachel, Serena, Charlie, Aman, Alex and Joel and Ellie)  have been boldly enjoying and relishing in their new homes near the sand in the gorgeous little village of Estero de Plátano. We all live on the same street (there are about three [...]

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 [...]