They’re trying, they really are. But they’re not there yet.

Our guided tour of Cartagena was, basically, “These expensive-looking condos are where the rich people live. These hovels with no electricity or running water are where everyone else lives. And over there, you’ll see the fleet of submarines Pablo Escobar used to transport cocaine to Puerto Rico.”

My favourite aphorism from the day: “We’re not poor. We just don’t have any money.”

Not a serious retirement contender. But the sloth was cute.

Too. Fucking. Hot. It’s like breathing soup.

The canal, of course, is a wonder. The colonial city is spectacular. I have wanted to see the Bridge of the Americas – our sole terrestrial link between the northern and southern continents – since reading The Tailor of Panama years before.

I wasn’t fond of the armed guards at every public washroom. I was most definitely not fond of the very intimidating armed guard at Manuel Noriega’s derelict mansion.

And it rained. Torrentially. Every fifteen minutes. Our excursion guide told us we were in luck: we had arrived at the very end of their rainy season. Otherwise, it poured all the time.

Not a serious retirement contender.

An armed camp. Everything is surrounded by razor wire.

We docked at the Calloa seaport and had to be driven off the container terminal in buses. Or should I say bus, singular? It turned out that the good folks in Lima had prepared only one solitary coach for the occasion. It carried, each trip, perhaps eighty passengers from the several thousand who had booked city excursions that day. We were in line for more than two hours. Worse, someone from the port authority walked our (increasingly grumbly) queue with his video camera, recording each one of us for who-knows-what-reason. And then we had to pass through an extremely gruff customs gauntlet before we were allowed into the roiling city, where I was immediately set upon by a prostitute.

Regardless, I was entranced by Lima. Chantal was not.

We both enjoyed our excursion to the recently excavated Pachacamac, a 1300-year-old Incan city about 40 kilometres southeast of Lima. They were still unwrapping information kiosks while we clambered over the temple-pyramids. Our guide would periodically stop, poke around in the dirt with an index finger, and then hand us what he called “sand treasure,” bits of unearthed ancient pottery or pieces of (Human? Animal?) bone, which he said we could keep.

Lunch was excellent, if you like potatoes and corn. I like potatoes and corn, very much.

And that was all the time we were given. It took so long out of the container terminal, and Lima traffic was so impossibly congested, that our guide canceled the remainder of our outing for fear we wouldn’t be back before sail-away. We saw the colonial city from a bus window. The rest is a haze of roadside trash, black belches of diesel exhaust, and dour-looking barrios.

Not a serious retirement contender.

It is barely possible to describe Chile’s wonders.

To visit the Atacama Desert is to tour the surface of Mars. NASA tests its rovers on this red, arid soil. Geoglyphs, ancient mummies, expansive plateau vistas, impressive mountain ranges, and palm oases straight from a romance novel. We were immediately spellbound.

I don’t recall much from La Serena. Good coffee. An old man advised me to take a tighter hold of my camera, lest I lose it to a slash-and-dash.

We strolled Pablo Neruda’s charmingly artsy hillside neighbourhood in Valparaiso. The Viña del Mar seaside reminded me strongly of San Francisco. Santiago was like discovering a graffitied pocket of Europe in the southern hemisphere. Our tour of the Casablanca Valley winegrowing region left us breathless for its overpowering beauty and culinary excellence. Absolutely mesmerizing.

And also, unfortunately, so far from home that we might as well have been in Singapore or Hong Kong. There would be no emergency trips to Canada. No seeing the kids and grandkids, except on rare occasions when 23 hours of travel seemed worth the high price and extended visit. There would certainly be no attracting them, or other family members or friends, to our retirement home – except perhaps as once-in-a-lifetime adventures.

We would be entirely on our own down there. Alone and isolated, in a Spanish-speaking sea of humanity.

Not, reluctantly, a contender.

Never mind the fact that I got food poisoning. They told us, “Don’t eat the raw shellfish!” I ate the raw shellfish.

We ported in Manta, a city of 220,000 located 45 minutes north from where we would eventually settle. Manta’s pier, which boasts a spiffy new cruise terminal/convention centre, is an easy walk to the main shopping and nightclub district to the southeast; and to parks, a large fish market, the business district and barrios to the north.

Of course, Manta today is very different from the Manta we visited in 2013. Fewer than three years later, and shortly after we had committed to build our retirement home on the coast, the city was flattened in a once-in-a-lifetime, 7.8 magnitude earthquake. Today, the grand Mall del Pacifico stands directly across from luxury condos, the beach, a busy malecón, and the port. I don’t recall what was there before. A KFC, I think. One or two condo buildings. The immigration office where Chantal and I would one day apply for residency.

The first person we met was an American, a Mormon, who had retired to Ecuador with a gaggle of other Mormons and who drove to the city whenever a cruise ship came to town. “To hear English again,” he told us, after hearing our English and assuming we were from the States.

We carried a very simple map of the downtown. He helpfully marked it with a walking tour and the locations of restaurants where food was safe for foreigners to eat. (I ordered my first concha ceviche at one of those “safe” restaurants. It was a cold, inky, and unappealing substance that was not at all what I thought it would be. I ate it anyway – fearlessly, as Anthony Bourdain would recommend – and vomited like a firehose for three days.)

It was our walking tour that most impressed us with Ecuador and her people.

At one point we became lost at the corner of Calle 15 and Avenida 13, a few blocks east of Iglesia la Merced. Lost is not the accurate word. We might have stopped for a minute or two to get our bearings. Streets are not reliably marked, so it’s easy to become disoriented. Especially if you’re directionally-challenged, like me.

The moment we glanced at our map, a very concerned-looking woman appeared out of nowhere to ask, in Spanish, if we needed help. We sputtered something incomprehensible, I’m sure. She then proceeded, with Spanish-for-the-stupid and wild gesticulations, to guide us to wherever we wanted to be. Which was interesting, because we had no idea where we were going or what we would do when we got there. We thanked her profusely, turned the corner, and immediately stumbled into the centre of a massive community Bingo game.

When I say massive, I mean they closed the entire street. Several hundred players, music, vendors of street meat, and prize tents pitched along the curbs.

It was one of those times when you feel the eyes of the world upon you. Everyone stopped, even the caller, mid-call. They stared at us. We stared back at them. No one made a sound. For a moment, it felt like that dream when you’re back in high school and forget to wear clothes.

And then something happened: the one indelible memory of our day in Manta. The caller leaned into his microphone, smiled, and said: “Hola!” “Hola!” the crowd boomed after him, and everyone waved. We burst out laughing and waved back. Hola hola hola, we heard as we made our way down a row of seated players, entire families with children in their Sunday best. Hola, amigos. Hola.

There were other things we did that afternoon. But this was our takeaway: the kindness of strangers to strangers in their midst. Friendship, community, belonging: simple and genuinely offered. You don’t find places like this too often.

That evening, we watched Manta retreat behind us as the sun set over the ocean. I felt a sincere pang of regret for leaving too soon.

Later, at home in Ottawa, when the ad that changed our lives appeared in our local paper, it was this memory that brought us easily back to the country we now call home.