Scary mime and sheep guts
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007Celebrating our newfound freedom that evening, we headed to the Queen Vic for a good old fashioned pub quiz. I am pleased to say we lost, pitifully. We then proceeded to get absolutely smashed around the bars of Quito with some lads from Manchester in South America for the Copa America. Interestingly turned out that I went to school with one of their cousins in Guernsey, small world huh!
Needless to say we did not make the 7am bus to Saquasilli to the visit the indigenous market town there. What we actually did was fall out of bed at about 12:00 and eventually make a 2pm bus to Lacatunga, a larger town just of Saquasilli where we intended to stay the night before starting the Quilotoa loop the following day. (At this point could I apologise for the spelling of these Ecuadorian towns, I don’t have my guide book with me to check). We had driven through Lacatunga before on the way back from Baños and didn’t think that mush of it, but actually when we started exploring it was really quite nice. Small cobbled streets, a large interesting market and a big sunny, leafy plaza in the north of the town. We wiled away a lazy afternoon here sitting in the sun and watching a very smartly dressed band mime their performance to a camcorder and a small group of mocking on lookers. They did at least have the decency to look embarrassed! It was a very strange phenomena, at first we thought they might be filming a music video but the video camera looked like it cam out of a Christmas cracker and the miming was terrible, although the dance moves were good… very odd!
Unfortunately, Lacatunga seemed to have a shortage of places to eat and whilst we did find a good Italian, we ended up eating there three times since there seemed to be little else. Fortunately for us our hotel had a 10pm curfew so it was exactly as if we could paint the town red anyway.
The following morning we fared slightly better with busses and managed to catch the first bus to Chugchulan at 10am. The bus journey was four hours of dusty, stuffy, smelly bumpy road through some of the most beautiful scenery we had seen in Ecuador so far. My favorite thing about Ecuador is how green it is, and this journey was no exception. We wound our way up and down valleys, admittedly on knife edge roads, through lush green hills and tiny villages, all the time overshadowed by two enormous snowcapped mountains. At one point we also saw a still smoking volcano, far more impressive than the one in Bolivia, it really was pretty cool. Throughout the trip we were also treated to the music videos of Los Puntos, a particularly horrific Peruvian band whose total repertoire was frighteningly similar and whose videos had been filmed in bulk on, you guessed it, a camcorder out of a cracker. Suddenly the actions of the Latacunga band were becoming frighteningly clear. A small mercy being that they had had the self respect not to chose the same tasseled leather as Los Puntos. Seriously I will never think about at Cusco Airport (the set of their multiple videos) in the same way again. Never the less were weren’t sorry to fall out of the bus at Chugchulan and arrive at Mama Hilda’s. A really nice hostel with hammocks, a bar and a spectacular view of the valley below. Initially we set out to explore the village; however 20 seconds later and we had reached the other side of the square and were out of the other side, so really there was nothing to do but kick back in a hammock for the afternoon and relax. Bliss.
Since there was nothing to do in the village the hostel provided dinner in the evening and we chatted for a while to our fellow travelers. The interesting thing about Ecuador is the kind of people traveling there. There are far more holiday makers and far fewer “travelers”. As a result Paul and I appear very worldly and well traveled and can feel mildly superior for a short time, I hate to say we did indulge in this for a short time over dinner with a perfectly nice Flemish couple who were being escorted around Ecuador for two weeks by a tour guide – pah guides! After dinner we were entertained by all of the little girls in the village who changed their grubby tracksuits and Shrek T-shirts for traditional local dress and danced around the maypole for us. It was lovely to watch, the colors of their costumes and the maypole ribbons were really lovely and they were all such good dances and I don’t think any were older than eight. Ahh, it brought back my Maypole dancing days on the Oxspring village green, although I was glad they didn’t ask me to share that experience and join in! No wait, they did, at the end of the performance, we were all on our feet joining in, you could hear the men’s backs giving out as they bent to dancing with the girls.
The following morning, Paul the slave driver that he is, insisted that we catch the 4am bus to Laguna Quilatoa. Admittedly the only other option was a 3am bus, but we could have hitched!! Anyway, I duly dragged myself out of bed and onto the stinking bus at 4am, with the promise that it would at least be light by the time we arrived at the lake. An hour and a half later we fought our way off the bus past the sacks, women and chickens, none of whom were willing to move out of the way, and out onto the DARK road in the middle of know where at 5:30am. Now I wanted to see the lake too, but not in the dark. But we made our way up to the viewing point above the lake, which is in an old volcano crater by the way, and tried to make ourselves warmish and wait for the sun to come up. Now, I hate to admit this, and don’t tell Paul, but it was beautiful watching the sun come up over the mountains, and it was lovely to be there on our own in the peace and quiet, maybe the 4am bus was worth it.
At about 6:30 just as it was getting light and we started to think about walking down the crater to the lake, we were joined by a local guy who asked if we were planning to walk down to the lake and if we needed a guide. Whilst we assured him that we were confident we could follow a direct path for 400m to the bottom, we did ask about the possibility of hiring horses to come back up, it is a pretty sheer slope and apparently horse is the best way to do it. Well, he hurried off to ask his friend, who returned a few minutes later with arrangements for horses and the offer of a cup of tea. Well I readily accepted as it was cold and still not quite light enough to start our descent, and of course still bloody early! We followed this guy back to his house/café where we were seated in front of the fire and given hot tea whilst he continued to work on his paintings in the corner. Only then did we notice that in the double bed in the corner of the same room, his wife was still asleep!! Well, I bet she was thrilled to see us, and whilst he was keen to explain to us that they were speaking to each other in Quecha, I bet she would have had a few choice words to say to us in any language. Needles to say we necked our tea and made our excuses as fast as was polite, not before we had had to buy some of his paintings however – jammy operator, guilt trip us by waking up his wife at 6:30am then ask us why we don’t like his work – what could we do!?
Anyway, we eventually wandered down to the lake at about 7:00am, and it was lovely and peaceful and a very nice walk. But I was glad we had horses back up, it was really steep and sandy and we had already arranged with another local a lift to Zumbahua to the local market in his truck at 8:30. I was glad we had hired horses that it, until we say the donkeys that arrived to carry us back up. I swear we thought we would flatten them just by sitting on them, never mind asking them to carry us 400m up a vertical slope! That said my affection for the beast was slightly lessened after sitting on their incredibly boney unsaddles spine for 45 minutes – John Wayne is not the word for it! But with much huffing, puffing and flatulence (my God I did not know mules had wind like that) we eventually made it to the top and were bundled into the back of the truck well before 8:30 and arrived at the market by 9:00. This was proving to be a busy morning. The market was nothing like Otovalo, not that we expected it to be, it was totally a local market with just a couple of gringos walking around. There was a whole area devoted to clothes and shoes, and the usual mounds of fruit and veg as well as the women cooking a number of unappetizing dishes around the side. There was also a huge livestock market making up about half the size of the market area. Now, I would like to think that I’m not too much of a squeamish person and that I am getting used to animals in this country – for example the women next to me on the bus on the way to Chugchulan was carrying a number of live chickens in a small paper bag on he lap – but the animal market was too much for me. There were chickens being wrung left right and centre, cows’ heads just lying on the side of the road and sheep having their thoughts slit into buckets right in front of their mates.
So, following our early start we were back on the bus to Lacatunga by about 10:30 and back in the hotel having the most thorough shower ever by about 13:00. That afternoon it was lunch at the Italian again and a lazy chilling out in the park before a TV movie and munchies in the evening. In our defense, the owner of the hotel had asked how late we were going out as she was leaving her mother in charge and we didn’t have the heart to keep her up late – honest! Paul also had other worried on his mind, that afternoon he had taken some washing to the launderette but unfortunately they couldn’t do it in time for the next morning, but no fear, a toothless old lady carrying a bag of rubbish and wearing her slippers overheard Paul’s dilemma and offered to do his washing by the next morning, a strange offer which of course he accepted. Fortunately, this rather odd judgment proved not to be too bad and the worst that happened was that he was hideously overcharged and collected the following morning a bag of still wet washing. Still, his underwear gave Olga (the washing lady’s name) and her husband a good laugh, apparently this is not the sort of underwear worn by respectable Ecuadorian men – the mind boggles!
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