On Saturday´s Otavalo supposedly has the biggest market in South America. We arrived on Friday to find a ghost town but woke on Saturday morning to a magic transformation. Every street and square was packed with stalls, manned by indigenous people in their best traditional clothes.
Along with the stalls come lots of tiny, scrunched up, old women beggars, dressed from head to toe in black. The way to help them is to eat at one of the food stalls and put a put a bit of meat into their proffered bowls. The stall owner then usually tops this off with a spoonful of rice. The way not to do it, is the American way. Give two old women a $5 bill and tell them in English to share it, as if one is going to say lets go to the bank and get change. Instead what you get is a nasty mass beggar fight and a hysterical American.
If we had worked harder at our Spanish we would have understood the guy trying to tell us that the bus back to Quito was taking a 2 hour detour across the Andes on winding dirt tracks with shear drops. And we wouldn´t have:
- spent 4 hours on a bus with children being sick,
- like, sat, like, oh my god, like next to a, oh my god, really like annoying, like, oh my god, like, Australian girl,
- had a driver who got lost and had to keep asking for directions
- missed our bus to Mindo
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