Otavalo

Day 98 (October 4, 2018) – Otavalo, Ecuador

Not all days of this trip are glamorous. In fact, most days are not. It always takes a couple days to orient ourselves to a new location and learn the unspoken rules. Are the taxis safe? How does public transportation work? What parts of the city should we be avoiding at night? What is a reasonable price for a cup of coffee? Is contact lens solution sold in grocery stores or pharmacies? There is a long list of things to figure out in each new city, and it always feels like a very complicated puzzle that needs to be solved.

On the bus ride from Quito to Otavalo. There are always mountains nearby in Ecuador.

Despite the challenges of travel, there are still more than enough days filled with excitement and wonder to keep us going and wanting more, but that can’t be every day. Sometimes we need time to lay low, catch our breath, and plan the next big adventure. Otavalo, a mid-sized town two hours north of Quito, was that place for us. Otavalo, which can be walked across in 20 minutes, is a lot more manageable than Quito, which takes an hour to cross by bus. The mountains surrounding Otavalo are beautiful, and it made a good place to hang out for a few days.

Otavalo on a cloudy day.

Otavalo is known for having a large market where they sell all sorts of things, but the most noticeable are the woven goods. You can buy brightly colored blankets, carpets, scarves, hats, dish towels, and anything else that you can think of that is made from cloth. It would have been fun to actually go shopping, but our already over-stuffed bags prevented that. And we soon learned that it is entirely uneconomical to ship things home.

The market in Otavalo.

We also had a taste of the ubiquitous street food, mote, a cup filled to the brim with cooked corn kernels topped with sauce, chicken, mushrooms, cheese, and a whole bunch of other things. It was tasty and deceptively filling. We also stopped by a pie shop at one point for dessert. We tried the blackberry pie and the mango pie. The mango pie, covered with a few inches of meringue, was much better. It was too hard to ignore the constant crunching of tiny blackberry seeds in the other.

A cup of mote. Basically, cooked corn kernels covered with a myriad of sauces and toppings.

Otavalo is known for being a good home base for visiting many of the nearby mountains and lakes. We didn’t really take much advantage of that, but we did spend an afternoon hiking to a nearby waterfall. It was about an hour walk from town and was a nice excursion out of the city and into the hillsides.

A waterfall just a short one hour walk from downtown Otavalo.

Back in town we took care of random chores. The need to launder clothing seems constant. We try to find accommodations that have washing machines, and especially driers, which are harder to find. We’ve found that without a drier our clothes seem to continually stretch out until they don't fit properly. A quick cycle in the drier will shrink them back into shape again. But without a drier in Otavalo, we had to dry them the old-fashioned way. A least the view was nice!

Laundry day.

We also spent some time planning our next stop, which was going to involve a three-day hike called the Quilotoa Loop. This was a bit more complex than most of our stops, so that took up the better part of a day to figure out the details.

We're always on the hunt for good coffee.

The second half of that day was spent mailing in our absentee voting ballots. I thought voting was meant to be easy. It's not when you're abroad. Despite being in the age of the internet, you are still required to print out, sign, scan, physically mail things in, and make a required phone call (at least for Pennsylvania). This is a challenge when you don’t have a printer or scanner, and have a phone that only works when the internet signal is strong enough. Fortunately, there are many places around town where we could print and scan, and our internet was good enough to handle a phone call. But then we encountered the most challenging part: sending physical mail. 

The mail system in Ecuador is not nearly as sophisticated as at home. We ended up using DHL because the nearest Ecuadorian post office was two hours away in Quito. First of all, you have to manage to show up at DHL when someone is actually working there. The door is open, but no one is behind the counter. We eventually found the right person after about the third trip back. We then struggled to communicate where we were sending it. They had issues with the address being an office building and not a physical person with a cell phone number. We ended up sending it to a person called Mr. Voter Service. When the envelope was sealed, we got our bill: $60. Yes, to send an envelope with a few papers from Ecuador to the US it cost 60 US dollars. And they don’t accept credit card. Cash only... of course. Well at least we have some pride knowing that we managed to navigate the complexities of voting abroad and successfully performed our civic duty.

Running around the streets of Otavalo to take care of our absentee voting ballots.

At the end of our time in Otavalo, we finished with a little taste of home. Feeling a tinge of homesickness (mostly me, not so much for Travis), we reenacted what used to be our typical Friday night. We made a giant pizza, opened a bottle of wine, and watched a movie. The pizza almost didn’t make it into the oven using our MacGyvered tinfoil-covered-cutting-board pizza peel, the wine cork was so dried out we almost gave up on trying to open it, the weak internet made the movie a struggle to get through, and in the end our dinner cost about three times the price of going to a restaurant, but it was all worth it. After our time in Otavalo, we were recharged and ready for the next adventure. 

It may not look like much, but this screams of home to me, regardless of where in the world we are.