Food in Ecuador – Drinks

May 21, 2019May 18, 2019 P B 0 Comments

So, after having given a big thumbs up to the food in Ecuador – let’s mention some of the drinks….

Soft drinks
Ecuador put in quite a good effort for variety of soft drinks. Maybe not so many varieties as Peru – but they were a bit better quality…. yes, do you sense a pattern? 🙂

Hats off to Ecuador for the return of the Pomelo drink. Yes, it does says Toronja on the label… you have to learn more than one word for ‘grapefruit’ if you want to travel in South America…

‘Ice’ – in lemon flavour, and also in naranjilla flavour. Naranjilla is also known as ‘lulo’ or Solanum quitoense. ‘Ice’ didn’t taste that good in either flavour to be honest.

‘Apple and nothing’ and ‘Lemon and nothing’. Interesting naming, and also a good refreshing drink.

Pukara – not bad – the lemon drinks are usually a pretty safe bet…

Coconut juice – this was AMAZING!!! Note that it is coconut **juice** and not coconut **water**.

PB finds coconut juice in Latacunga market.

‘Pony Malta’ – this is a malt drink – made from the same stuff as beer, but with no alcohol… not too bad – but not as good as beer! 🙂 This drink is very popular all over the Carribean area as well.

Coffee
When we arrived in Ecuador, we discovered that they were selling local coffee all over the place. We also discovered a coffee machine in our airbandb – so of course off we went to buy some coffee…

Our first bag of coffee was straight from a market stall – purchased by weight, and then ground and put in a plastic bag. This stuff was pretty good.

After we finished our first bag of coffee, we were still in Loja… (it didn’t take long!). It wasn’t market day, so we tried a bag from our local corner store . This was also pretty good.

Sadly, when we left Loja we didn’t stay in many places with coffee-making facilities – and we hadn’t purchased our special ‘coffee sock‘ yet – so we bought some instant coffee – also from the local area.

Instant coffee from Loja. Not all that great…

When we arrived in the Galapagos, we discovered that it was also a coffee region. In fact it was a very special coffee region of extreme high quality – due to the unique geographical conditions on the islands. Therefore we found a cafe on each island that we liked – and went OUT for coffee nearly EVERY DAY! 🙂

When we left, we HAD to buy a packet of coffee…

Coffee from the Galapagos island of Santa Cruz – this coffee was AWESOME.

Of course, the Galapagos coffee soon ran out – so we bought some ‘standard’ supermarket coffee. We also purchased our ‘coffee sock’ – so NO MORE instant coffee for us! 🙂

This is the standard supermarket coffee.

Now that we had our own coffee-making facilities, we were able to buy the local coffee wherever we went!

Coffee from the Intag region of Ecuador. This was pretty good stuff.

So Ecuador really surpassed the other countries as far as coffee goes – the best of the trip so far by a long way…but Colombia was still to come…

Weird tea
And finally a mention to the stuff that they call ‘horchata‘. This means very different things in different countries – but in Ecuador it refers to an 18 herb infusion – it is very popular. For us, it was just ‘OK’ – we weren’t the biggest fans – it tasted like a weird herbal tea…

So there you have it… drinks of Ecuador – EXCEPT for one VERY special drink – which is so fantastic that it will have its own post…

Chile to Mexico

Food in Ecuador – Drinks

Leave a Reply Cancel reply