The weekend before I headed to the Amazon I traveled north of Quito to the town of Otavalo with a Finn I met at my host family´s house. Rita teaches Swedish at a university outside of Helsinki so we had fun talking about linguistics and language learning and all that. She talked me into eating a guinea pig for dinner one night (expensive and almost no meat on it) and we shared a few bottles of wine over travel tales and impressions of Ecuador.
Otavalo is a two-hour bus ride from Quito and it quite popular because it hosts a huge indigenous market, including an animal market every Saturday. It also turned out that the Kichwa, who make up 75% of the town population, were celebrating the summer soltice and the harvest. However, the opening celebration started the night we left. The opening ceremony was to be at a waterfall above town where at midnight most people of the town, I guess, were to do a ritual bathing in the freezing cold waterfall. Then there were plans for parades and dancing all day and night for a few days. I would have stayed if it werent´for the flight to the Amazon I had already booked.
The indigenous people here are very beautiful, both men and women, and of course, the children are gorgeous. They are really short though, 4 feet and a bit on average, so a child of six looks like a toddler in the States. These Otavalanos own most of the businesses in town and are considered to be the most well off indigienous group in all of the South America. They are very friendly and cheerful. Germans and Barcelonians should be sent there for customer service training.
Since we were two, we were able to hire a car to drive us around for a day. We visited waterfalls, caught a first communion ceremony in a town plaza, visited a crater lake in the pouring rain, visited the workshop of the most famous weaver in Ecuador, and had a great meal in a town that specializes in high quality and inexpensive leather goods.
On our way up to the lake, we passed a junction where a large group of indigenous people were having an early ceremony, and it appears as though they inbibed a good deal of chicha (a local brew). When we returned the crowd started looking a bit ugly and as our car approached a group of intoxicated men surrounded the car yelling and shaking their fists, some even pounded on the car! One was standing in front of the car with a very big stick gesticulating wildly. After a few anxious moments, we realized that they were yelling for money, and oddly enough, only a dollar. So we hastily passed the toll out the window and they moved away and let us through. Our mestizo driver had no clue as to why they wanted that sum, and we didn´t get a chance to talk to other indigenous people before we left to find out what that was all about. It was a chilling moment though, and Rita who earlier had been thinking about staying on for the festival decided to return to Quito with me that afternoon.
The landscape was gorgeous, in many areas reminiscent of the Alps in Switzerland and it was great fun taking local buses to get around town and to get home. The local buses get as crowded as the daladala´s in Africa and were quite cheap. The fees are 25 cents for intracity buses and a dollar an hour for intercity travel. So the ride to Otavalo was only $2.00! Everyone, it appears, can get around well.
I´m off to spend time with a rural family in another community in the Andes tomorrow for a week. Great fun.
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