My tryst with Ecuador started even before I boarded my flight from New York to Quito two weeks ago. I think it was 2014 and I was off on my first trip to Central America (Guatemala) then. The elderly Ecuadorian gentleman sitting next to me on the flight, wearing a black hat above his ponytail, smiled warmly as I tried to practice my rusty Spanish with him. When we got off in Miami to change flights, he waited in the departure area to hug me goodbye. Ecuador is your kind of place, he said, as we parted. I had no plans of visiting Ecuador then, and quickly forgot about him, his kind eyes and his wrinkled smile. Until I nervously boarded my flight two weeks ago – my first time in South America, alone, a newbie vegan. I saw him, again and again, in elderly men, wearing black hats with long ponytails, with an understated elegance, on the cobbled streets of Quito and in indigenous Andean villages. And his words sort of sum up my first impressions of the country: …