Otavalo – Ecuador Holy Weekend Part I
“I wouldn’t mind getting out of Riobamba for a while.”
Whenever my companiero Josh says he wouldn’t mind something, that means he really wants it. “Sounds good to me.”
We share a taxi to the bus station, taking an egalitarian 50-cent hit to our pocketbooks. Quito is four hours in a bus from Riobamba. We get on it. Four hours later we are in the Quito Cumandá bus terminal with the exciting prospect of deciding where in the land of equators we want to go. We finally decide to go to Northways, to the famous market town of Otavalo, do some shopping, and hike around a lake or two. Fifteen minutes later, we are on our way. We take out our books, dictionaries and flash cards and compare the English language to the two languages we are currently learning: Spanish and French. “Milk” and “vagina” are masculine in French, but feminine in Spanish. We decide to agree with Spanish on that one.
Otavalo is calmly packing up its multifarious goods in the early evening showers. This headline goes under, “Another Day in the Life of an Otavaleño.” Their small dog companions bark at us as we wander around the pint-sized pueblo. The centro north of the famous crafts market is remarkably modern and inviting. It suddenly feels very much like a part of a bigger city but without all the noise and insecurity. Perhaps it is the Holy Week status, but the people here are extra friendly and inviting, not missing a chance to greet with a smile.
We find a satisfactory room for $4/night at Hostal El Gerundo. The beds are comfortable, there is electricity and good bathroom services, but the ceilings are a meager six feet, couple inches high. Neither of us is over six feet tall, but we still have to take precautions not to smash the ceiling light bulb with our heads. Josh quips, “With our low overhead, we pass the savings on to you.” Indeed. The staff is sure to ask us our plans so they can help us find our way.
We explore, buy some water, make some notes, get a Sprite zero, and sit down in the skeleton of the marketplace, which is a plaza dotted with gazebo-like seating in its off-hours. We could see the silhouette of the surrounding hills as we plopped our asses down and serenely considered the liberty and awesomeness of third-world travel.
Early the next morning, it is on to the harrowed bargaining of the famed Otavalo market in which the local craftsman engage in their daily labors and theatrics, telling you precisely how many drops of blood, sweat and tears are involved in the production of their goods, making us feel like we support child exploitation if we don’t take asking price. There are some enticing goods, and we are nothing but sheltered grub worms among seasoned barometers of the depth of the gringo pocket. We pay about 15-20% more than any native would think of paying, but we still feel like thieves. $4 for a handwoven manbag. That’s classy.
The bread in the Café Donut’s bakery looked enticing, so that’s where we had breakfast. I was particularly seduced by the all-too-rare drip coffee—while Ecuador neighbors Columbia and boasts some fine domestic beans, it nevertheless consumes almost exclusively instant coffee. Darn shame. I had mine black as sin. Josh enjoyed an opulent donut. As inconspicuously dressed simple gringos, we were one of few among natives with their frilly blouses, colorful skirts, utilitarian serapes, bola-like hats with feathers, and men with long braided hair; or the European prototypes with their dredlocked women and bearded men dressed in capris so they can show off their calf tattoos. We represented with no-shame jeans and T-shirt, mine plain black, his advertising Michigan State. They travel because it’s in style. We travel to get around. Cheers to that.
25 minutes from Otavalo, the crater lake of Cuicocha is predictably on top of a hill. However unpredictably, two hills rise out of it, closed to the public for biological research on wildlife that is exclusively endemic to those two hills, apparently. Boat rides around these two islands are offered for $1.50.
It was a beautiful Good Friday morning and we embarked on our circumnavigation of the lake without edible provisions, naively thinking we would be finished in 2-3 hours. However, nothing in our experiences of circling lakes prepared us for the nearly two thousand vertical feet we would ascend and descend in the exaggerated albeit beautiful terrain of the circumference, which positioned us 2 hours shy of our goal and in a grumpy state. Neither were we expecting the encroachment of rain clouds that mounted their sneak attack from behind the massive Cotocambe volcano, which posed for us a race against time. Although defiantly walking clockwise on the trail which is universally recommended to be traversed counterclockwise, we met no passing travelers. We later discovered this may be due to the fact that it is even more recommended to take the first half of the trail—counterclockwise of course—and then turn back. But we enjoyed traversing the cow-track version, battling stickers, unmarked forks and disappearances of the trail. That is until hunger set in and we saw open before us an apparent stairway to heaven which turned out to be just a stairway to a gazebo looking out over the lake. Hungry and weary, we slumped on to the benches and enjoyed the fantastic view for the few moments our low blood sugar allowed us. The hunger became oppressive and the clouds menacing. We made haste, passed a hippy-looking American as the raindrops began to fall, nodded a hello, and continued on our exodus, soon spotting a young native maiden on the pinnacle of the next hill, a grocery bag full of something—the bulges looked delicious—resting against her leg on the lookout bench. This was the setting for one of those unexpected travel delights that make all the discomforts worthwhile.
As we neared the friendly-looking woman, I eyed her grocery bag like a vulture, in a strictly literal sense. I contemplated friendly conversation, but my appetite was getting the best of me and all I could think about was how I could get my hands in her bag of goodies. We stopped at this spot to enjoy the view. She started the conversation in decent English. “Have you seen a boy going up that way?” We remarked that we had, talked about how they met, swapped stories about our respective English teaching careers, and related the fact that they weren’t missing much by turning back. “Are you tired?” she asked. My window of opportunity had opened.
“Well, we’re more hungry than anything,” I replied. “Yeah,” said Josh. “We haven’t eaten since breakfast.” The moment of truth was upon us. Is she a giver? Will she relinquish her sumptuous nourishment upon our ravenous bodies? Our hungry eyes scanned her face for answers…
Jubilee!
“Hey, take some of these. It’s no problem.” She pulled a bag of seasoned banana chip “chifles” for us to nibble on. My heart rejoiced with the sound of 1000 resounding cymbals, but we tried to keep our cool, eating a few and watching her response, nervously making moves for a few more until we had greedily devoured the whole package. We burbled exaltations just short of proclaiming her our lord and savior. Then her boyfriend, a curly blonde-haired Californian, returned. Amidst more friendly talk he got wind of our appreciation for the snacks and enthusiastically asked us if we would like some sandwiches as he pulled a loaf of bread, meat, cheese, and mayonnaise out of the miraculous grocery sack. Our lives just got a whole lot brighter. We made sure they had already eaten and weren’t hungry, then we quickly cleaned them out, not withholding our appreciation, naturally.
On the descent, the friendly conversation with our new friends made the chilly drizzle plenty bearable. It was during this discourse we discovered Ryan—the quintessential Californian with his “dude”s and “man”s—had been in the same obscure Christian university study-abroad program as Josh was, only a year earlier. The program takes about 50 applicants a year. After some more strolls down memory lane and a few “wow, small world, huh?”s we realized all three of us knew some of the same people from Bend, Oregon. Later Josh realized he already had the guy’s e-mail as the one contact from the program currently living in Ecuador. The world was so small it was almost constrictive.
No sooner had we arrived at a shelter, the rain began to fall in sheets. We gathered under the tin roof and watched the water fall in a cascade in front of us, waiting on the rain that showed no signs of letting up to let up before walking the kilometer back to town and hailing a ride. It was at this time we discovered our friends had commissioned a taxi ride from that very spot in twenty minutes. They offered to share the ride back. It was, as they say, an offer we couldn’t refuse.
Ryan’s native girlfriend, Maleina, said every afternoon of every Good Friday of every year, without fail, it would rain extremely hard, as if the heavens were crying for the slain Son of God. We weren’t too sure about that as it seems to rain every afternoon in April, but I will admit that was the hardest rain I had seen in my six months in Ecuador. At any rate, for us at least, with food in our bellies and warmth in our hearts, we could say it was a very good Friday.
We fled from the taxi to the cover of the bus station. Furthermore, our new friends wouldn’t let us pay for our share of the taxi under the pretext that they were going to pay it anyway. “If you are ever in Quito, heck, you guys can look me up, and maybe we can all do something—not like I’m the best tour guide or whatever in the world, but yeah, if you want, let me know, for sure.” We exchanged some contact info, said our goodbyes, and boarded the bus with that primal satisfaction of being sheltered from a rainstorm. “Man,” resounded Josh, still gape-mouthed, “seriously, what are the odds I would meet the one guy in all of Ecuador who was in the same program as me on some random trail around a lake.” I had no experience as a statistician, but given those parameters, I estimated the odds as around 1 in 546,000 with a margin of error of about 30 billion. “Yeah, dude, I don’t know,” I kept saying, enjoying the roar of the rain on the roof overhead.
Tags: Ecuador, hiking, Travel
Aaron Baldassare