Ecuador
Location: South America
Ecuadorian Currency: US Dollar
Language: Spanish
Visa Information: You need to have at least six months of validity remaining on your passport.
Tipping: In most restaurants, rounding up your bill is an acceptable tip for the servers. Tipping 20% is not done. In many fancier restaurants, a service charge (usually 10%) may be added to your bill – in this case, there’s no need to tip. In taxis, also round up the fare. Consider giving an extra $1 or so when a driver helps with bags.
Weather
Quito & Highlands: Quito is broadly representative of the Highlands region as a whole and here in July the weather is about as bright and sunny as it gets all year. Better still for outdoors-lovers, it is dry: bone dry in fact. Average rainfall for the month in the vicinity of Quito is down at an incredibly low 1.34 inches/22mm, about a ninth of what it was just three months ago. Bright clear weather means colder although often beautifully star-filled nights.Oriente/Amazon: It has been getting wetter in the jungle throughout the first half of the calendar year but in July, change is in the air. It's getting drier. Rainfall is back down to its levels of March in the Parque Nacional Yasuni area. River levels remain high, however. Temperatures are at their lowest of the year but, in the Amazon, that's still on average a sweaty 75.4°F/ 24.1°C
Desert Coastal Strip & Galapagos: Fog hugs the coast this month, and it's cold compared to earlier in the year. Fog and cooler weather have also come to the Galapagos, although in both regions it remains dry.