I will be going with a friend down to Ecuador for 2 weeks ( +/- a few days as necessary ) in the beginning of January with the intent of getting as much as we can out of the mountaineering opportunities there. Just for some background info, we're from the Northeast US and can handle ourselves with crampons and an ice axe and have technical ice/rock experience but have no high altitude experience and very minimal glacier travel experience. For that reason we want to try to design our trip around...
A. Learning the stuff we don't know, and really learning it well, so in the future we can travel the more moderate glaciated peaks unguided confidently. (Albeit not in Ecuador because I realize guides are required) So things like crevasse rescue and avalanche classes are of great interest to us.
And of course B. Climbing the volcanoes, at least one of which being one of the big ones. (Chimbo, Cayambe, Antisana etc.)
With that being said, we aren't sure if we should focus our efforts on finding a private guide to stick with us for the whole two weeks and customize the trip to our needs, or just a la carte our way through the classes and climbs we want to do. The biggest limiting factor here is budget. We're broke engineering students, so $1,500 a piece is going to be about what we can work with unless $2,000 each is going to somehow unlock the best trip we ever go on. (This may completely eliminate the chance of getting a private guide, we're not sure, that's why I'm posting) If anyone has any suggestions here on how we can get the best bang for our buck, guides we should look into, or whether or not the classes down there are even worth taking in terms of quality, we would really appreciate it.
Trying to make this an awesome learning opportunity and be able to climb some big peaks without blowing through our mostly non-existent life savings. Thanks in advance for any help or advice you can offer.