After another two days of going uphill I arrived in Ipiales and the border with Ecuador. The air was cold and thin. Gasping for breath, I said goodbye to a country I had fallen in love with and entered another.

From the border, where the usual money changers, pickpockets and disgruntled border officials did everything to make life worse, I rode towards Quito.

But in Ecuador it seemed as though someone had dimmed the lights and turned down the volume. Gone were the smiles and friendly cheers of encouragement from the roadside. Gone were the picturesque colonial farmsteads with their flower-covered porches. Here the homes were functional, unfinished concrete, spewing construction steel.

It rained, it was cold and I wanted to turn around. Sheltering from a tor­rential downpour in a dirty roadside hamlet just north of Quito, I surveyed my ­options for dinner. A few limp-limbed chickens did another turn in their ­mechanical rotisserie; a plate of worn-out humitas, a sweet tamale, waited for that unlucky customer to save them from another night under the heat lamp; a bored teenager with too much hair gel prodded and probed a row of disturbingly red hot-dog sausages.

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Not at all tempted by the usual suspects that made up the options in these small Ecua­dorian towns, I began to wonder if my hunger could hold out until breakfast.

Hello! What’s this? At the end of the street, sheltering from the rain ­under a tatty umbrella, an old lady was fanning frantically at the coals of her small grill. I took a seat on the cold steps of the grocery store from which she served and watched her work while a steady stream of customers pulled in from the rain.

I ordered a bowl of grilled chicken gizzards, served on a heap of sweetcorn and fried kernels of salted maize, and it was immediately clear that she knew what she was doing. As the evening passed by, the buses, trucks and pick-ups splashed through the rain-filled potholes of the main street.

We didn’t talk much, but that seemed normal here in Ecuador; from what little was said, and my persistent interest in the secret of her giblets, it was obvious we enjoyed a common love of food, and it wasn’t long before our conversation turned to cuy.

I expressed my dismay at having only found this traditional dish strung up like freshly runover roadkill in front of the tourist restaurants en route from Otavalo to Quito, and my keenness to see how these rodents were prepared at home. I was invited for lunch the following day.

Cuy, conejillo de Indias — Indian rabbits, or guinea pigs as we know them in the pet shop — have been an important food source in Peru and Ecuador since pre-Inca times. Fifteen centuries later, they still remain an Andean delicacy, and on average Peru­vians and Ecuadorians gobble down 22m of these tasty rodents every year. Most Andean households keep cuy at home in the same way we might keep chickens.

Considered a speciality, they are mostly saved for special occasions. Rather like a bottle of champagne, or perhaps a box of Ferrero Rocher, a mating pair of guinea pigs are a typical house-warming gift for a newlywed ­couple.

Playing an integral role in Andean religious and ceremonial practices, as well as providing dinner, cuy are also used in the traditional medicine of the region. A live cuy is rubbed over the body of someone sick. Its squeaking indicates the diseased area of the human patient. The hapless beast is then split open to allow his internal organs to be examined, thus furthering the diagnosis of the human.

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