After Regis St Louis' first journey to the Andes in 1999, he returned home, sold all his belongings and set off on a classic journey across South America. Since then, he's returned numerous times, traveling dodgy roads by truck, horse and bicycle, scaling Andean peaks (small ones) and flailing away at Spanish and Portuguese. On his most recent trip he dined his way through countless cevicherias, joined the night ride through Quito's old town and finally learned some salsa moves.
Regis is the coordinating author of South America on a Shoestring. and he has contributed to more than 30 Lonely Planet titles. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Greg Benchwick has been writing about Latin America for the past 10 years. He's rumbled through the jungles of Central America, met with heads of state white working for the UN and trekked along ancient Inca roads in Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru.
To cap off his research for the central and southern highlands, Greg huffed and puffed his way to the top of Cotopaxi. This is the third edition of Ecuador & the Galapagos Islands Michael Grosberghas worked on. In addition to his Lonely Planet assignments, he's visited Ecuador on a number of other occasions, including a long-ago summer spent teaching in Quito. During his graduate school days he focused on the literature and culture of Latin America.
Michael, a reformed academic, is based in Brooklyn, New York and has worked on more than 17 Lonely Planet books. Tom Masters first went to Ecuador as a student backpacker and immediately loved this fascinating corner of South America. Since then, he's covered all corners of Latin America for Lonely Planet, including Mexico, Cuba and Venezuela. Covering the vast Oriente, the stunning northern highlands and the super-relaxed north toast for this book was a real adventure that involved fording surprisingly large rivers in a tiny car, anaconda sightings, a laptop breakdown in the rainforest and one shamanic soul cleansing.