Ecuador Freedom Bike Rental

Humans have a funny habit.

We're always keeping score.

Tallest building. Fastest car. Deepest canyon. Biggest this. Highest that.

Turns out Ecuador quietly stole one of the best titles on the list.

Most people assume Mount Everest sits closest to the stars. Fair guess. Huge mountain. Famous mountain. Gets all the attention.

But the Earth isn't a perfect sphere. It's got a bit of a belly around the equator. And sitting right on that bulge is Chimborazo, a giant volcanic beast that pushes its summit farther from the center of the Earth than any other point on the planet.

Which means if you're standing on top of Chimborazo, you're technically closer to space than anyone standing on Everest.

Not bad for a mountain most people couldn't find on a map.

The funny thing is that you don't even have to climb the thing to appreciate it.

You can spend the day riding across the Ecuadorian Andes with Chimborazo filling the horizon like some oversized movie prop. Every turn brings a different angle. Every mile makes the mountain look bigger, meaner, and somehow even more ridiculous.

No photo really captures the scale of it. Your brain spends half the day trying to figure out whether it's fifty miles away or five.
That's probably why riders, climbers, and adventurers from all over the world keep adding it to their list.
Some places are worth traveling to.
Some places make you pull over, shut off the engine, and just stare for a minute.

Chimborazo has been doing that to people for a very long time.

Ryan and Mark came down from New Mexico looking for a little more excitement than the average vacation package tends to offer.

Mark brought along Emily, his travel partner and an electrical engineer, while Ryan joined the adventure as a good friend who was more than happy to swap everyday routines for a few days on two wheels.

So the three of them pointed their trip toward Northwest Ecuador and went looking for something different.

A few days out here has a way of clearing the mental cache. One minute you're talking shop, deadlines, projects, and responsibilities. The next you're riding through cloud forests, climbing mountain roads, stopping for coffee in small towns, and wondering why life feels a lot less complicated when your day revolves around a motorcycle and a map.

Mark spends his days working as a mechanical engineer. Emily approaches the world through electrical engineering. Both are used to systems, calculations, troubleshooting, and figuring out how things work.

Ecuador tends to interrupt that train of thought.

Roads twist through the mountains with absolutely no concern for efficiency. Weather changes its mind halfway up a pass. Volcanoes appear around corners. Tiny villages invite you to slow down whether you planned to or not.

For a little while, calculations get replaced by curiosity.

The cloud forest doesn't care about deadlines. The mountains aren't interested in project schedules. And nobody has ever improved a motorcycle trip by checking work emails from the side of a volcano.

If the three of them head back to New Mexico with a little less mental clutter and a few more stories than they arrived with, we'd call that a pretty successful week.

William and Rhian have already figured something out that takes some people a lifetime to understand.

Kids don't remember every toy.

They remember the stories.

So instead of signing their boys up for another week of scheduled activities, matching t-shirts, and adults blowing whistles every twenty minutes, they brought them to Ecuador for six days of dirt roads, mountain tracks, campfires, and the kind of adventure that sticks around long after the vacation photos disappear into a phone gallery.

The dads already know the feeling. They've spent enough years chasing motorcycles down backroads to understand that the best days usually start with a rough plan and end with a story nobody saw coming.

For the kids, the classroom looks a little different this week.

Breakfast comes with fresh fruit picked nearby and enough Ecuadorian coffee to get the grown-ups moving. Lunch might happen in a tiny village where nobody's in a hurry and everybody wants to know where you're from. At night, the stars put on a better show than anything streaming on a screen.

A few years from now, they probably won't remember every road or every stop.

They'll remember crossing rivers, getting muddy, sleeping under big skies, and watching their dads grin like kids every time the trail got rough.

And when school starts again, they're going to have a few stories that nobody else in class can compete with.

Alexandre has officially finished the kind of trip most people only talk about after two drinks and a bad case of wanderlust.

Originally from France and now living in Florida, he bought a Royal Enfield down in Argentina, pointed it north, and rode it all the way up to Ecuador. Then, in a move that deserves a little respect, he managed to sell the bike here for about what he paid for it. That is not travel luck. That is motorcycle traveler math done properly.

For the final chapter of his Ecuador ride, Alexandre rented this Piaggio scooter from us to head out to the Middle of the World and visit the Intiñan Museum. “Intiñan” comes from Kichwa and means “Path of the Sun,” which is a pretty fitting name for a place sitting right smack dab on the Equator. It is one of the more interesting places in Quito, with exhibits on Ecuador’s indigenous cultures, traditional homes, Amazonian history, and the always-entertaining equator demonstrations that show just how strange and fascinating this little line around the planet can be.

Congratulations on a proper South American ride, Alexandre. We wish you the best on the next adventures, wherever the road takes you from here. And when you need two wheels in Ecuador again, you know where to find us.

The Best Motorcycle Adventures Start in the Middle of the World!

ECUADOR FREEDOM BIKE RENTAL
Calle Finlandia N35-06 y Suecia
Quito, Pichincha

-E C U A D O R-

FreedomBikeRental.com

Sometimes the best part of a motorcycle trip has nothing to do with the bike.

It happens on the side of a mountain road, beside a loaded-up dual-sport, when a rider stops long enough to connect with a kid from a small rural community. A pencil, a notebook, a soccer ball, a few minutes of attention — small things, until you see what they mean to someone who does not get handed new things very often.

That is the idea behind our **Ride for a Purpose** program. On our tours, riders bring school supplies, art materials, children’s books, or sporting goods in their luggage. We carry them by motorcycle or support truck into communities we have been visiting for years, then hand them directly to the schools and families who will use them. No middleman. No overhead. No feel-good theater. Just riders using a little extra space in their bags to do something useful.

Ecuador gives us ridiculous roads, volcanoes, cloudforest, jungle, coast, mud, cobblestones, and views that make you stop talking for a minute. But the people along the way are what make these trips stick with you.

Pack a little extra. Ride a little deeper. Leave something good behind.

Learn more about Ride for a Purpose here:
https://freedombikerental.com/en/about/pack-for-a-purpose-community-initiative

Nathan and Lorraine from Colorado just picked up one of our BMWs and aimed it straight at the Andes for their own Ecuador adventure.

They rented the bike, made their plan, and now they’re off to do the good stuff: ride ancient cobblestone roads, climb into big volcano country, soak in hot springs, and spend the night at a beautiful mountain lodge instead of wasting vacation time standing in lines with people wearing matching lanyards.

Their route will take them toward Cotopaxi, the world’s largest active volcano, where the roads get older, the air gets thinner, and the scenery starts acting like it has something to prove. This is the kind of place where a rental bike turns into a proper story: cold mountain mornings, stone roads under the tires, steam rising off the hot springs, and that big Andes silence that makes your phone feel pretty useless.

That’s the beauty of renting a motorcycle in Ecuador. You can take one of our well-equipped bikes, point it toward the mountains, and build your own ride around the places that pull you in. Nathan and Lorraine have the right idea: get the BMW, get out of Quito, ride the old roads, soak the sore parts, sleep somewhere beautiful, and come back with a grin that looks slightly suspicious.

Have a great ride, Nathan and Lorraine. Colorado sent us two proper adventurers.

Want to build your own Ecuador ride? Rent a bike and go find the Andes the right way.
The Best Motorcycle Adventures Start in the Middle of the World!

ECUADOR FREEDOM BIKE RENTAL
Calle Finlandia N35-06 y Suecia
Quito, Pichincha
Ecuador

FreedomBikeRental.com

Charles from Kansas and his son-in-law Nathan from California just pointed their front wheels at Ecuador’s **Guided Cloudforest, Coast & Craters** tour, with Jhordy leading the way. Info on this tour: https://freedombikerental.com/en/articles/97-guided-tours/7-days/85-guided-cloudforest-coast-and-craters

This is seven days of proper adventure riding for people who still think a motorcycle trip should involve a little dirt, a little sweat, and a whole lot of “where are we and why is this so good?” scenery. The route starts in Quito and cuts through Ecuador’s wild middle: high Andean roads, dripping green cloudforest, volcanic country, Pacific coast, sandy beach towns, crater lakes, hot springs, and enough curves to make a straight-road rider need a quiet moment alone.

But this ride is about more than pretty views and good roads. Jhordy is not just up front because he knows which way to turn. He knows the people along the route. He knows the artisan cheese makers, the farmers, the fishermen, and the local woman who serves our groups **tonga** on her farm — a proper coastal Ecuadorian meal wrapped in a banana leaf, usually packed with rice, chicken or fish, plantains, peanuts, and the kind of flavor that makes a sad airport sandwich seem like a personal insult.

That is what changes the whole trip. You are not just blasting through beautiful landscapes with your mouth hanging open inside your helmet. Jhordy adds the context. He helps you understand what you are riding through: who lives there, what they make, how they work, what they eat, and why these little places matter. The cloudforest, the coast, the crater country — it all hits harder when someone can connect the roads to the people.

The ride is about **60% paved and 40% unpaved**, so you get the fun stuff without signing up for a week-long survival exercise. You’ll ride from cool mountain air down toward sea level, hit warm coastal roads, soak in volcanic spring baths, rumble through small towns, and see places that still feel like somebody forgot to ruin them with chain hotels and plastic nonsense.

Grab a spot on an upcoming **Guided Cloudforest, Coast & Craters** tour and come see why Ecuador hits harder than countries ten times its size. https://freedombikerental.com/en/articles/97-guided-tours/7-days/85-guided-cloudforest-coast-and-craters

Gerald spends most of his time flying cargo planes.

Big machines. Big engines. Long hours.

So when a day off finally showed up, he had a choice to make.

Sit on a balcony with a coffee and admire the scenery from a safe distance...
Or grab a Honda Africa Twin and go see what was hiding around the next corner.
You can probably guess which option won.

To be fair, a guy who spends his working life moving heavy machinery through the sky was never going to be intimidated by a motorcycle. Different cockpit. Same addiction to horsepower.
By the end of the day he'd covered plenty of ground, burned through a tank of fuel, and probably added a few more roads to the list of places he wants to revisit.
The funny part?
This is already his second time doing exactly that.

Some people spend their days off catching up on sleep. Gerald seems determined to spend his collecting stories instead.

We've got a feeling one day wasn't enough.

Again.