Otavalo

Since my plans to go to CRACYP´s brand new project by rather fancy looking Hacienda Zuleta were cruelly thwarted, I´ve spent longer mooching around Otavalo than I had originally planned. So much for the better! This is firstly because I´ve had more internet access than in the past two months to actually write here, and secondly because day-trippers to Otavalo are missing out on the charm of the town that grows on you after a few days spent wandering around and finding your bearings rather than getting lost in a colourful, dizzy mess of mid-Saturday market goers.  Coming off the Panamerican Highway, Otavalo has the same misleadingly dusty and crumbling suburbs as any Latin American town without fail, that I´ve seen. The town also has its fair share of half-finished concrete buildings in the centre, so it´s not quite as hidden a gem as somewhere like Puebla, but the market here does the same job as Puebla´s colourful tiled buildings and cathedral (I´ll dig out a picture) that kick a bit of life into a town off a main road. Except the market is far more changeable than the tiled walls. 

Otavalo is the most widely attended indigenous market in Ecuador and people trade here every day of the week. On Saturdays the show is even more impressive as the market sprawls out of the main square up the surrounding streets on all sides.

Saturday is the day for ´la entrega’ when artisan traders come from outlying indigenous villages to sell what they´ve made, filling up little stalls around Plaza de Ponchos (as it´s called, of course)with woven fabric made for table cloths or into bags, alpaca woven shawls and blankets and woolly jumpers, tapestries, little trinkets  like and jewelry and leather. It´s like a festival, always busy with the occasional sound of music and people buying food to snack on. And people seem of a lively disposition running to their neighbour’s/aunt's stall to get change or chatting with passers by.

On my first day I went out just before seven as they were setting up and had a look round in peace before the hordes arrived and there was already food cooking and ladies setting up piles of corn and people stringing up their canopies to funny white blocks that are there especially to hold the market. I´ve been through the market every day now, and my favorite time is early evening when the sun is starting to go down and the stalls are packing up because the tourists have gone home. Now there are mostly only Otavaleños left at the market chatting to each other as they pile their stalls into an unbelievably small package to haul on their backs home. Every day!

A lot of knitting to keep out the cold at high altitude, this is one of my favourites so far:

Also available are Spongebob, the aliens from Toy Story, Bender from Futurama, Hello Kitty and generally cute animals. And indigenous children actually wear them, I´ve seen it! I was eating in a very nice place upstairs called Cafe Imbabura run by a young indigenous couple. There were no other people there when I went to eat a very delicious burrito with a view over the market. Anyway their two little children had on knitted hats. Indigenous women in the Otavalo always wear long skirts and these white blouses. In Quilotoa they wore fine alpaca cardigans and long velvet skirts with interesting designs on - more to come in another blog when I find the time. As well as the very cute hats there were also a lot of these around:

They look a bit like a knitted gimp mask or a monster of some kind, disturbing.

I bought a piece of fabric for a table cloth from this lady below and her really colourful stall. You might be able to see that she has a cross of white fabric going across her - that´s her baby on her back. He´s called Samuel (in the picture below) with his aunt, Mery, who I met as she was part of a group of students from Tulcan looking for gringos to practice their English on. I was just sitting down people-watching with a coffee by the park to escape tourist clogged stalls and spoke to them all for a while. I ended up taking them round the market and they then took me up to Peguche falls where they were going. Mery is from Otavalo originally and we became good friends over the course of the day - it was only in the afternoon I found out I´d bought fabric from her sister that morning! We then went round the market for the last time and I bought some very long strings of beads indigenous ladies wrap round as bracelets - always in pairs -which have to bedone up very specifically. It´s a challenge to do yourself. These photos wont stay put in the right place so I´ll sort them later! 

This is probably all you´ll get until I´m back as I´m too impatient to wait for photos to load in an internet cafe and have things to see now. Tomorrow I´m finally going on a horse trek all day out to Lagos de Mojanda and then staying with an indigenous family to try and pick up some Kichwa! I´ve also been invited to Tulcan right in the north to stay with Mery and her student friends and teacher. Will see Tulcan´s famous cemetery (about all it has I think) and maybe give them an English lesson! Then to Tiputini, Puerto Lopez and then home.

I wish I had more time to explain what I was doing for the previous two months, but it definitely merits proper treatment and ability to edit photos, so here´s a little idea of what to expect!

Making friends with the kids in Jilimbi, teaching them how to make clay faces and paper flowers, four kids on one horse, bugs with big jaws, worrying that we haven´t connected the gas properly, kittens being born and growing up, swimming in the river with the kids, old ladies climbing up oranges, drinking sugar cane juice and learning how to make 62% sugar cane alcohol, making cookies with a Montuvio, climbing Chimborazo volcano, making home made corn tortillas for tacos and a million and one other tasty things, moth watching while brushing teeth, water coming through a hose, compost heaps, issues with too many papayas, now a horrible aversion to papayas, gettin itchy hands from peeling papa china, making juice by hand, carrying back food from the market in the ranchera, taking camioneta trucks for 50 cents a go, sharing these with pigs or chickens, traveling in a banana truck, getting bananas for free, renting a very slow mule and much more!

Oh, and a cursory mention about tea: in Jilimbi we thankfully had many teabags and even made iced peach tea. Verveine importantly exists here (and even grows in the wild, but bitterly) but I think in the cinema building the upstairs cafe (with a view of Imbabura volcano I am going to sketch again) has loose leaf, exciting. Have also had first experience of mate coca tea for high altitude and like it lots.