Mail
Letters and postcards sent from Ecuador can take anything from five days to a month to reach their destination, though they're often faster to North America than anywhere else. Under 20g, it costs around $0.7 for the Americas, and $0.8 for the rest of the world for air mail (mark your letter por avión ). Prices rise steeply for personal mail that weighs more (around $3 for America, $5 for the rest of the world for a letter of 101g), though you might get away with sending a chunky letter in a big, brown envelope and calling it impresos (printed matter), for which you'll pay at substantially reduced rates (101g is roughly $1.7 for the Americas and $3.6 for everywhere else). When buying stamps it pays to check the clerk's arithmetic and to get your mail franked in front of you. Note that many envelopes ( sobres ) in Ecuador don't have a sticky back; you should find a pot of glue somewhere in the post office.

For printed matter and small parcels sent airmail, it costs about $10 to send 2kg to the Americas with each additional kg costing $5 to a maximum of 10kg. For the rest of the world this is rather harshly marked up to $24 for 2kg and $12 for each extra kilo. Surface mail (SAL/APR) is naturally cheaper but much slower. Sending anything of value, you can have it certified ( con certificado ) for around $1 extra, but this can have the effect of alerting people to its value, so if you want to be sure that something gets home, a private courier such as DHL is the best option, even if it is a lot more expensive .

Sending large packages means getting a box from a supermarket or a sack from a market, and turning up at the Correo Marítimo Aduana on Ulloa 273 and Ramírez Dávalos in Quito, near the Santa Clara market. Take it unsealed but bring string or tape to seal it after it's been inspected by customs. Again you may find it easier to go through a private courier, or go to the airport and use the relevant airline shipping service - only worthwhile for packages of over 10kg as they charge around $7 per kg with a minimum of $70 per package. The SAE keeps up-to-date information on the best ways to send parcels home.

You can receive poste restante at just about any post office in the country. Have it sent to "Lista de Correos, the town concerned, Ecuador", and make sure that your surname is written as obviously as possible ("Joe BLOGGS", for example), as it will be filed under what the clerk thinks your surname is; you'll need to have photo ID to pick it up. If there's a return address on it, it will be sent back if you don't manage to pick it up. In Quito, Lista de Correos mail usually ends up at the main office on Espejo and Guayaquil in the old town; if marked "Correo Central", it could well go to the head office on Eloy Alfaro 354 and Avenida 9 de Octubre. The most convenient post office for people staying in the new town is usually the Surcursal #7, at Torres de Almargo on Reina Victoria and Avenida Colón, which also has a poste restante service.

American Express card holders can make use of AmEx offices for mail services, and some embassies also do poste restante. The SAE will take mail, phone messages (during club hours) and fax messages for members.

Telephones
In 1998, the national telephone company, EMETEL, was split in two ahead of planned privatization: Andinatel , serving the sierra and the Oriente, and Pacífictel for the coast and Galápagos. Unfortunately no buyers could be found, and the system remains uncompetitive and inefficient, despite the new names. Negotiations with possible buyers are still ongoing, and it's thought a deal will be done some time in the near future, hopefully providing better service and possibly lower prices. Most towns (and many villages) have a telephone office (daily 8am-10pm, except in remoter places), and domestic calls are relatively straightforward and reliable from these.

Before you make a domestic call from a phone office, you'll normally be given a plastic token from the counter, with your cabin number on it. In some older offices you have to tell the clerk the number you want, and wait in the cabin for your phone to ring, which shows a connection has been made. In others you'll be able to dial the number yourself. At the end of the call, you hand back the token at the counter and pay for the calls you've made. There's a three-tiered tariff system for calls within Ecuador: a minute's worth of local calls costs around $0.03, regional calls $0.08, and national calls $0.13. Calls to cellular phones (prefixed tel 09) are charged at $0.47 a minute. You can also buy tokens ( fichas ) at phone offices for the few remaining, prehistoric-looking public phones - though it's easier to use the phones in shops and kiosks, or the good (but more expensive) cellular public phones maintained by Porta and Bell South, which use prepaid phonecards, usually sold in one of their nearby shops (look for the sign in the window).

International calls are frighteningly expensive: three minutes to North America costs $6.5, $10.4 to Europe and Japan, and $12.35 to the rest of the world. You'll have to leave this amount at the counter ( caja ) as a deposit, but if you expect to speak for more than three minutes, it may be worth leaving a larger deposit as the clerk will often get jittery and cut you off if you go much beyond the amount you've handed over. If you speak for less time than you paid for, you'll get a refund.

The Internet
Every month, new Internet cafés and points of access open up in Ecuador's larger towns and cities. In Quito, for instance, the competition has become so fierce that rates periodically drop to below $0.5 for an hour online. In light of the cost of international calls, email is one of the best ways to stay in touch with people overseas. You can get free email accounts from a number of different providers, Hotmail at www.hotmail.com and Yahoomail at www.yahoo.com being among the most popular. They only take a moment to set up and are accessible from any computer linked to the Net.

Some of the better-equipped places offer a net phone service, which allows you to make international telephone calls via the internet at the price it takes to log on (domestic rates). The quality of the calls isn't yet as good as being on a proper phone - you'll probably have to shout out your conversation in a crowded Internet café, ending every sentence with "over" because of the sizeable delay - but it really is the cheapest way of calling home.

At the moment, Ecuador's ISPs (Internet Service Providers) are only based in Quito, Guayaquil and Cuenca, and Internet cafés are less widespread outside these cities, as they have to pay regional or national phone rates to log on. In some cases the "cafés" (often a computer shop with one machine linked up) charge a cheap rate for the time spent writing emails off-line, and a more expensive call rate for the short time it takes online to send them (around $0.1-0.15 per minute). Having said that, the pace of change in this area is astounding, and the cost and availability of Internet access in Ecuador is likely to get better all the time.

It's generally not worth bringing your own laptop for Internet access, unless you're going to rent your own place. Very few hotels allow direct dialling from rooms, making logging on impossible. Make sure you have a surge protector ( supresor de picos/regulador de corriente ) before you plug in to the power supply; without one your hard disk can be badly damaged . You can get them at home or in Quito for around $10 at Coresol, Carrión 514 and Reina Victoria.