The big read: Hacienda Hombre

Andrew Unsworth revels in Ecuador's weird plants, elegantly faded mansions and famous hats

'Oh, Quito airport is the one where you practically fly down the main street," a well-travelled friend commented before I went there. He had passed through on the way to the Galapagos, as so many people do.

This is a pity, for Ecuador has so much more to offer than just that famous archipelago. It also has a brand-new airport due to open in Quito this year, 18km and a deep and dusty valley away from the sprawling capital. The old one is indeed now hemmed in by suburbia and has no space for a carport.

Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain apparently once said that he had found all South America had to offer in Ecuador. It was my first trip to the continent but I can believe it: many countries boast of diversity, but in Ecuador it is remarkable. Quito itself lies in a cramped valley 50km long and just a few wide, surrounded by five volcanoes. The old city creeps up the slopes of one, Pichincha.

Drive two hours to the northwest, through dry, scrubby landscape that looks like the Karoo with lantana bushes, and you cross a ridge into rolling hills that could be in Zululand; another mountain ridge hiding Inca ruins and you are in deep cloud forest, where moisture from the Pacific is blocked by the backbone of South America - the Andes.

The luxurious Mashpi Lodge has been controversial among the hut-preferring locals. This modern, minimalist-designed boutique hotel, perched on a spur in the 14000ha forest, is on the spot of a former logging station with minimum impact on the environment. It's a cocoon of air-conditioned luxury where you can lie in bed and watch the mist finger through the trees metres away.

Well you could, but I eagerly set out with my guides, Santiago Molina and Manolo Zambrano, to explore, often not going that far, but the muddy floor requires boots and patience and the forest itself demands attention - all those leaves, flowers, frogs, insects and of course birds. Mashpi has only been open a few months, and a year ago Zambrano was cutting sugar cane in the valley below.

Now he's mastering English but "check it out" was all he really needed to summons me to his telescope to see an owl butterfly, a lizard, a frog, a toucan, a lineated woodpecker, a choco trogon or a rose-faced parrot. This is probably the best place for bird-watching in South America, but I was as interested in the plants: unfamiliar trees, orchids and climbers, very familiar elephant ears, bromeliads and philodendrons.

All are verdant, all are chewed by insects so that only the newest leaves are perfect - as in the African bush, all life is food.

North of Quito are the grassy highlands once carved into vast haciendas by Spanish settlers, who ran them like medieval fiefdoms - mini-villages employing thousands in agriculture or basic manufacturing, like the woollen textiles for which Ecuador is famous. Towns and villages still specialise in the trades they learnt back then, leather, wood, weaving.

The best place to buy the almost gaudy, geometrically patterned textiles is Otavalo, which turns into a vast market town on weekends. I was there during the week and the central square was enough to pick up thin, soft rugs, a poncho ("What the hell for?" you ask yourself back home) and an alpaca jersey because, though it's on the equator, Ecuador can be surprisingly cool.

Most of the estates are long gone, confiscated in land reforms, but the elegant hacienda homesteads remain, often in faded glory.

One, Hacienda Pinsaqui, just north of Otavalo, is now a hotel with eclectically furnished rooms around cobbled courtyards, an old manor house furnished with French and Spanish antiques, chandeliers and paintings. Maids scuttled about in almost Victorian uniforms that are actually the local traditional costume.

The garden was an ageing forest of fir and palm trees, giant impatiens, fuchsias, moonflowers, bougainvilleas, agapanthuses, arums and hydrangeas. Despite the vaguely Spanish architecture dating back to 1790 (and rebuilt after an earthquake in 1867), the whole place reminded me of a Cape wine estate.

The verandahs, the horse paddocks, the garden were all familiar; the small Catholic chapel perhaps not. Nor the fact that Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century liberator of much of South America from colonial rule, used to stay here.

In the evening, a small group of tourists, mostly Americans of the breed interested in the world, were entertained in the bar by estate workers playing the Andean panpipes, a guitar, fiddles and drums. Very jolly, very touristy, but why not? I bought their CD.

Over lunch at the far older and grander Hacienda Cusin, I met the English owner Nicolas Millhouse, who has spent the past 23 years restoring it. He quickly informed me that his role model for hotel-running was Basil Fawlty and all his new staff have to watch a few episodes of Fawlty Towers to get the idea.

Where in England was he from, I asked. "Manhattan, actually," he replied. I sorely wished to share the evening and a bottle of wine with him, and he wanted to show me his rebuilt monastery, but I had a plane to catch, so only had a hint of the eccentric expats who no doubt pepper South America.

The flight from Quito to Guayaquil, Ecuador's largest city, lasts about half an hour but it cuts a four-hour road journey, and the famous cross-Andes rail link between the cities is still being restored, although you can now ride bits of it, including the zigzagging Devil's Nose.

From Guayaquil, a city that holds little for tourists, a road crossed the flat coastal plain with cocoa plantations before starting a 90-minute climb to over 1200m to cross the Andes.

After we'd penetrated the first cloud layer, the Andes were still above us. By the time we'd crossed them, we were in the second and could see nothing until we descended into the green valley below, one of many whose streams and rivers flow to the Amazon.

Our destination was the old city of Cuenca, a city so charming I was not surprised to learn it has a growing population of retired Americans and Europeans (Ecuador is the cheapest country on earth in which to retire).

Cuenca is a beautiful old city of two- and three-storey adobe-tiled buildings along cobbled streets: its universities and colleges make it a vibrant one as well.

Here I visited the Homero Ortega hat factory (toquilla straw hats - more famously known as Panama hats - are all made in Ecuador), where local hand-weavers bring in their unfinished hats made of Carludovica Palmataleaves. The workshop then bleaches, moulds and trims them.

Different versions of the hats are traditional all over Ecuador, for men and women, and judging by the pictures in the showroom, they are as popular in Hollywood as they were in the '40s when they were the country's top export.

In the Andean hills and valleys east of the city, we visited a food market in the village of Gualaceo. I was drooling at the sight of a whole row of 12-hour spit-roasted pigs, but my guide Javier Guerrero said they discouraged tourists from eating in markets lest they get upset tummies.

 I was not a tourist and had a cast-iron stomach, I quickly informed him, and ordered a $5 plate of the pulled pork with cascaritas (crackling) served with whole, boiled corn. It was one of the best meals I ate in Ecuador, and Xavier thanked me for over-ruling the rule as he licked his fingers.

Standing on the roof terrace of the stunning Casa Gangotena Hotel in Quito one evening, I watched a motorcade pass below, escorted by police cars and sirens, cars and buses of people. "Oh God, they have blue-light convoys as well," I thought, but the key vehicle was not a luxury black sedan, it was a van carrying an upright glass case.

After enquiring, I was told that it was Our Lady of Guadeloupe, visiting from Mexico. It was an effigy of the Virgin Mary in procession and she is regarded as the mother of South America.

In Ecuador, the ornate gilded churches are used by worshippers all day. The convents house nuns. This is a deeply Catholic country, with its own twists.

In Iluman, known as the village of shamans, we had spontaneously stopped on a Monday morning to see people visiting their dead relatives and ancestors in a small graveyard, as they do every week. They sat on and around the graves sharing and eating breakfast dishes, fruit, and drinking.

 People in the traditional costumes they still wear were chatting to one another, praying, or talking to the dead to keep them informed, ask guidance maybe. It was incredibly beautiful.

Down the road, we met an old woman emerging from her simple house, dressed in gold necklaces but wrinkled and poor.

She was 80 or 90, she told us; she did not know. But she was content, she said, because she lived on the slopes of Papa Imbabura - waving at the volcano behind Iluman. It is regarded as the most sacred mountain in the Andes.

The past is always with us, and in Ecuador, so are volcanoes, so people hedge their bets.

If you go ...

Getting there: SAA flies to Buenos Aires and Sao Paolo. LAN flies from both to Ecuador. Alternatively you can fly via Madrid, Amsterdam or the US to Ecuador direct.

REQUIREMENTS: South Africans do not need a visa to visit Ecuador. You do, however, need a yellow-fever certificate.

More information: Go to www.casagangotena.com, www.mashpilodge.com or www.haciendapinsaqui.com.

• Unsworth was a guest of the government of the Republic of Ecuador