Otavalo
From Latacunga we decided to go to Otavalo for a few days as several people had told us it was a nice place to see. We arrived Friday afternoon and spent a while looking around the market in the main square, a big crafts market, mainly aimed at tourists but used by locals as well. There was a lot of really nice stuff and if I didn´t have to carry so much, I could have ended up spending a lot of money. As usual it started to rain so we gave up and spent the rest of the afternoon indoors. After dinner we went out for a drink and discovered that here you could even barter over a bottle of wine in a bar. This happened completly by accident, we asked what wine they had, were deciding whether to risk it as Ecuadorian and Peruvian wine is really bad and the bar women just started decreasing the price for us, after that we decided to have it and luckily it turned out to be Chilean wine, which they had to go out and buy specially for us.
Otavalo is famous for its Saturday market, so we were expecting it to be a bit bigger than we what we saw the day before but were suprised to see that it almost completly takes over the town as it spreads to all the streets around the centre. People come from all over Ecuador to buy and sell anything and everything. We spent all morning looking round, buying a few things, trying different types of food from the stalls. It has to have been one of the few times I have actually enjoyed shopping for anything.
In the afternoon we decided to go to Peguche, a small village nearby where they still maintain a very traditional lifestyle. The village was very quiet because everyone was at the market but we had a nice walk to a waterfall, until it started raining, so we went back to Otavalo.
THe following morning it was time to go to Quito as we only had a couple of days left before our flights.
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