The Province, Jan. 14, 2010.

Downtown Seattle after a 2001 earthquake measuring 6.8 in magnitude.

It's the middle of the night and most of Vancouver is sound asleep. But not for long.

A sudden seismic jolt wakes up most of the Lower Mainland and within seconds the eerie sounds of pictures falling off walls, shelves and appliances crashing down, windows breaking and buildings groaning in protest permeate B.C.'s largest city.

Terrified citizens jump out of bed to search for a place to take shelter, but their knees buckle as soon as their feet make contact with the floor.

Four minutes later, the terrible shaking stops and the population breathes a collective sigh of relief.

People might think the chaos is over, but really, it has just begun.

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Soledad Sanchez, 30, and many of her nieces wear traditional Otavaleño dress. KW photo.Bouncing through the backcountry of the Ecuadorian highlands in a pickup truck, I saw two small children merge onto the road, running to catch up.

It was late afternoon and I was being taken to my bed for the night — not a rural resort or a lodge but the homestead of an indigenous Quichua family.

The Quichua are a minority who make up about a quarter of the population in Ecuador. Like aboriginals in Canada, they have a long history of fighting for rights against the majority. In Ecuador, the majority are mestizos: people of mixed European and indigenous descent. There is a trend these days toward indigenous youths leaving their rural ancestral homes to find work in cities. Community tourism like the type I was about to experience is helping to counter this.

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Students of Felipe Serrano Moscoso Elementary school want scholarships. KW photoDeep in the Ecuadorian Amazon, a young indigenous boy with a winning smile rose from his wooden desk to announce his career ambition.

"My name is Nelson Shiguango. I am 12 years old and I want to study tourism," he said, looking around at the audience of 10 tourists who had come to meet his class.

He was followed by one of the other seven children sitting in his humid classroom. Showers beat down occasionally on the one-room school's corrugated tin roof and ran down its cement walls.

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Half of locals in the Galapagos can't afford to visit their own islands. KW photo.

As a child, Juan Elaje experienced the tail end of an era of innocence in the Galapagos Islands.

It was the late ’80s, and tourism at the time was still largely a fisherman’s game. Travellers who made the journey by air or boat from mainland Ecuador to the remote, sparsely inhabited province 1,000 kilometres off the South American coast usually faced a choice of helmsmen of small fishing vessels, eager to be their guides.

These pioneering tourists witnessed the same sights that captivated the young English naturalist Charles Darwin when he made his historic voyage there on board a naval ship in 1835: Sea lions and penguins hunting in turquoise waves, yellow iguanas plodding across red volcanic soil, blue-footed boobies feeding their chicks and giant tortoises roaming freely.

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Diego Gamboa, 2, is one of 7,000 children who live in the Galapagos Islands. KW photo.As a British Columbian, I'm inspired every day by the immense natural beauty of this province and questions about how it can be properly protected.

When the opportunity came up in May to travel to Ecuador to write a series about Canadian development assistance, the same questions seemed even more pressing. The tiny South American country is the eighth most biologically diverse in the world, and its natural habitats are constantly being hacked back by mining and oil companies, urban development and the growing pains of modernization.

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