Otavalo Market

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Today we booked another private tour, taking a day trip to the famous Otavalo Market. Actually, we accidentally booked this tour twice, once with the wrong date.  Oops!

Our new guide Eduardo picked us up at Hotel Quito.  This was about a 2 hour drive east of Quito, along the Pan American Highway. Because it was just us and our driver, we got to stop at a number of lesser known attractions.

The first was Pisque River's viewpoint of Volcan Cayambe.  It was not a great viewpoint. The volcano was in clouds, and there were wires blocking the view.  If you bent low to avoid the wires, you were met with garbage on the ground.

Next we stopped at Miralago Hosteria to view San Pablo Lake:

Otavalo Market, Otavalo. One of the meanings of Otavalo is "Blanket for Old People".  The town has 40,000 indigenous people, and most of them were here selling stuff.  The colours were wonderful:

Frankie was a bit chilly so she found this lovely sweater, 75% alpaca, 25% wool.

Just outside of Otavalo is the small peaceful village of Peguche Wasi. They are famous for their weavers and tapestries:

We had an interesting demonstration on how they make the different coloured dyes:

We had lunch in a town called Cotacachi (Salt Lagoon).  Afterwards we walked to look at their shops, every single one sold leather products.  Anton had a belt especially fitted for him:

Then an ecological reserve called Laguna Cuicocha, to see Cuicocha Crater Lake.  We were supposed to give our passport number to enter, but if we didn't have it, our guide told us just to write any old number like a mobile number, it was all bureaucracy.  Laguna Cuicocha means Guinea Pig Laguna, named because the largest island is a guinea pig shape.  Guinea pigs are highly prized as a source of protein:  they need minimum care and reproduce quickly.  

We walked along a very nice trail:

We had a nice shot of Imbabura here, another volcano:

This is a picture of Frankie telling Anton to stop pointing the camera at the backseat:

The drive there and back was quite interesting.  There are stray dogs everywhere:

We got stopped by police checks 3 times:

They had construction everywhere, even where the road looked perfect.  Merging into one lane was rather interesting:

Here's a delivery truck:

There is a whole town that specializes just in rose production:

When we got back to the apartment, we discovered that the internet was STILL out, that makes about 24 hours.  So we had a quick dinner and thought it would be a quick 1½ km walk to the Marriott hotel.  Well, it would have been if we had taken that left we were supposed to!  It was an interesting adventure walking the streets of Quito on our own, we have been very pandered to so far.  It was made more interesting by the fact that every shop had its own sidewalk, sometimes differing in elevation:

We decided to take a taxi back to the apartment!