Wander With Purpose
Our Social Impact
We believe in bringing travellers into closer contact with Ecuadorians and their ways of life, particularly in rural areas. We believe the Wanderbus can be a force for good in the country.
Back when we began, we made a conscious, deliberate decision to take travellers not only to mainland Ecuador’s ‘famous highlights’ (think Cotopaxi National Park, the Quilotoa crater, Baños, Cuenca…) but also to include remote communities on our routes. We therefore visit the highland lakes and villagers of Ozogoche Alto in Chimborazo Province, a women’s weaving cooperative near Montañita, and the Zambrano family farm in Manabí Province.
This research and development takes time and effort. We visited dozens of options several times before beginning the process of integrating them into our itineraries — which in some cases meant altering routes and timetables in order to include them in our journeys.
Organizing our groups’ visits and ensuring they will be equitable and engaging for everyone, visitor and host, is an integral part of this process. Every day we’re more convinced of the value of these investments and efforts.
We feel hugely proud of what we’ve achieved since beginning our operations in July 2018. We are just as excited about finding more and new ways in which the Wanderbus can have a positive impact across the length and breadth of Ecuador.
We recently embarked on becoming a B Corporation, joining 3,000 companies in over 60 countries that believe in balancing purpose and profit. We are convinced the certification will imbue our company and all our stakeholders with a positive vision of our work and future.
We look forward to sharing this vision, and joining forces with passengers, workers, supply chain partners, our community and wider society over the coming months and years as we strive to make our impact ever-more positive.
Hand-in-hand
Rural communities in every region in Ecuador face serious challenges when it comes to accessing government support, health, education and basic infrastructure. Their indices for indicators such as infant mortality, child labour, education levels, and women’s equality glaringly illustrate the challenges they face.
Unlike other tour operators who struggle to promise communities regular and significant flows of visitors, the Wanderbus’s routes around the country with a bus capable of carrying 30 travellers allows us to bring constant and continuous numbers to these communities — as well as the stores and restaurants we frequent on our journeys. This makes a huge difference to the impact we can create, the level of trust we can generate and our long-term commitment to our partners.
We firmly believe our presence in rural communities will not only make our service more appealing and interesting to our travellers, but that it can make a lasting impact that goes way beyond us.
By helping the villagers of Ozogoche Alto, for example, to value their Andean culinary heritage and to train them in food and beverage handling, and guiding, the families we work with will tangibly improve their quality of life, and go on to expand their tourism businesses beyond the visits made by Wanderbus passengers.
We look forward to sharing our and their progress on these pages into the future.
Communities We Currently Work With
Ozogoche Alto, Chimborazo Province
Located in the province of Chimborazo, in the heart of the Ecuadorian Andes, this community of around 60 families makes a living from cattle farming, selling milk and animals. The community was included within the boundaries of Sangay National Park in the 1990s, a situation that, although positive for the conservation of the páramo ecosystem, limits their agricultural and livestock activities. Within this context, we believed it was key to include this community on our Baños to Cuenca route, helping promote the beautiful Andean lake scenery of which they are the guardians to a wider audience, and thereby providing them with a sustainable economic alternative.
With this context, we believed it was key to include this community on our routes, helping promote the beautiful Andean lake scenery of which they are the guardians to a wider audience, and thereby providing them with a sustainable economic alternative. Since we began working with the community in the summer of 2018, hundreds of travellers have enjoyed their welcome and the incredible Andean landscape of Ozogoche Alto, generating stable incomes for three families.
We have already worked on improving the visitor experience by ensuring that elements of the community’s culture are more evident and assuring that the dishes served incorporate important, and nutritious, Andean ingredients such as potatoes, beans, pulses and lupin beans.
In Ozogoche Alto we are currently working on:
- Improving the infrastructure of the dining room for visitors
- Training the women in food and beverage handling
- Training them on improving their guiding skills
Visit Ozogoche on any of our passes that include the Baños to Cuenca route.
LA SEGUA
Located in the upper part of the estuary of the Chone River and favored by the confluence of the Carrizal and Chone rivers, it exhibits 164 species of birds, 22 of which are migratory. With about 1700 hectares of biodiversity, it is one of the major attractions of Chone and the country. The Segua wetland is home to 164 species of birds, reptiles and mammals; it is also the direct support for more than 100 families that benefit from this area by fishing and is a tourist attraction for the country. It is ranked fifth among the 19 wetlands of Ecuador and is on the list of the Ramsar Convention (La Segua was declared on June 7, 2000, a wetland of global importance by the International Ramsar Convention, for all its biodiversity).
EL CHORRILLO
