Eight days in Ecuador: downhill all the way from the capital to the coast

You arrive at nearly three kilometres above the sea and it will show. Do very little, and do it within four streets.

Plaza Grande is the place to sit while your lungs catch up. The presidential palace runs along one side behind a white colonnade, the cathedral along another, and the square works as the city's living room: shoeshine chairs, chess games, a brass band as often as not.

Half a block down García Moreno is La Compañía, the Jesuit church that people come to Quito for. It took more than 160 years to build and almost every surface inside is carved and covered in gold leaf, so the effect is closer to standing inside a jewel box than to being in a church. A fire in the 1990s took much of the roof; the restoration is why it looks so bright.

San Francisco takes the morning. The Franciscans arrived first, which is why the city is officially San Francisco de Quito, and the complex they started in 1537 fills one whole side of its own square. Buy the museum ticket rather than just walking into the church: it takes you round the cloisters, up to the choir and out onto the roof and the bell tower. On the high altar is Legarda's Virgin of Quito, a winged Madonna standing on a serpent, and the enormous aluminium copy of her on the hill outside is visible from most of the city.

Across the square, the Casa del Alabado holds a private collection of pre-Columbian ceramics in a restored colonial house. It is arranged by idea rather than by date or culture, so a room on shamans puts two thousand years of objects beside each other and the connections do the explaining. Ninety minutes.

In the afternoon walk north to the Basílica del Voto Nacional, begun in 1892 and still officially unfinished. Look up before you go in: the gargoyles are Galápagos tortoises, iguanas, armadillos and condors instead of European monsters. Inside, a separate ticket puts you on a plank walkway over the nave and then up a steep steel ladder into the tower, which is not the place to discover you dislike heights.

Take a driver or a small group tour and go south down the Panamericana in the dark. Cotopaxi is one of the highest active volcanoes on earth at 5,897 metres, and what makes it worth a day is not the number but the shape: a symmetrical glaciered cone rising out of a flat plain of tussock grass with nothing in the way of it.

Stop first at the visitor centre inside the park for the relief model and the mounted condor, which puts the geology in order in twenty minutes. Then drive up to Limpiopungo, a shallow glacial lagoon at 3,800 metres directly beneath the cone. The loop around the water is flat and takes about an hour, and at that altitude an hour is plenty.

The reason for the early start is cloud. Cotopaxi is usually clear at dawn and often invisible by noon. The volcano has been restless since 2015, the summit route has been closed for long stretches, and the park occasionally shuts at short notice, so check the day before rather than the week before.

Get to Quitumbe for a morning departure. The road runs south through Ambato and then turns east into the Pastaza valley, and the last half hour is the good part: the walls close in, the air warms up, and waterfalls start appearing on both sides. Three and a half hours, and the terminal in Baños is a ten-minute walk from anywhere you might sleep.

Drop the bags and walk to the basilica. It is built out of the black volcanic rock the valley is full of, named for a vision of the Virgin reported at the falls above town, and hung with votive paintings, each showing a disaster somebody survived with the Virgin painted small in the corner of the sky. Several of them are eruptions.

Then come back at night for the Termas de la Virgen. These are municipal pools rather than a spa, fed by the hot mineral springs that named the town, and the waterfall behind them is lit up in cheap yellow floodlight. Buy the compulsory swimming cap at the gate.

Start on the ridge. Casa del Árbol is a treehouse built as a volcano watch post above the town, with swings hung off it that go out over a long drop and Tungurahua standing opposite when the sky is clear. The bus from the market takes half an hour, costs a dollar and comes back ninety minutes later, which is exactly long enough. Go on the first one: cloud closes the view by mid morning and the queue builds behind it.

Back in town, rent a bicycle and ride east. The Ruta de las Cascadas drops down the gorge towards the jungle, so the ride is all brakes and no legs, and the rental includes a pickup truck back from wherever you stop. A few kilometres out, the Manto de la Novia comes off the opposite wall of the gorge in two chutes with a cable car strung across the void in front of it.

Eighteen kilometres out is the Pailón del Diablo, the Devil's Cauldron, and it is the best thing in the valley. A path drops to the river and then a staircase squeezes into a crack in the rock, streaming with water, and comes out in a chamber directly under the falls. You will be soaked to the skin. Two approaches lead in from opposite banks; take the longer one, which puts you underneath.

The long leg. It is about six hours down to Guayaquil, dropping out of the mountains through Ambato and Riobamba and then along the western slope into cane fields, banana plantations and heat. Take the morning bus and you are in the city by mid afternoon.

The bus terminal sits next to the airport on the northern edge, and a taxi downtown takes twenty minutes. Check in, change into something lighter, and go straight to the water.

The Malecón Simón Bolívar is the riverfront Guayaquil rebuilt in the late 1990s: fenced, gated, patrolled and packed every evening with the entire city. Walk it northwards as the heat drops, past the gardens, the monuments and the moored ship, and finish under the painted hill at the far end. This is the city at its best and it costs nothing.

Do the hill first, before the heat. The staircase up Cerro Santa Ana leaves the northern end of the Malecón and climbs in 444 numbered steps past houses painted in flat blue, green and yellow, with bars and ice cream stalls every few landings. At the top there is a chapel, a fort with cannon aimed at the river, and a blue and white lighthouse you can climb for the delta and the whole city. Stay on the main flight of steps.

Come down and walk inland to Parque Seminario, which everybody calls the iguana park. It is a formal square of paths and ficus trees, and it is full of land iguanas, dozens of them, some over a metre long, living there permanently and completely unbothered. The white cathedral faces it across the street and is a cool place to stand for fifteen minutes.

In the afternoon the Museo Municipal is free, small and better than it needs to be: pre-Columbian stone and ceramics, colonial pieces, a room on how the city grew, and the shrunken heads that everybody remembers on the way out.

Parque Histórico is fifteen minutes east across the river in Samborondón, and it is the surprise of the city: raised walkways through real mangrove with sloths, tapirs, macaws and caimans in big enclosures, a reconstructed coastal farm, and a small square of colonial houses that were taken down downtown and rebuilt here rather than demolished.

Go at opening, when the animals are awake and the boardwalks are still shaded. Two or three hours is right, and entry is free on most days.

It sits on the same side of the river as the airport and about twenty minutes from it, so the last morning is genuinely useful rather than a wait in a lobby.