Otavalo is the largest of the Andean markets, taking up the Plaza de Los Ponchos and several more blocks on a Saturday. Even though we weren’t there on Saturday, the plaza still buzzed with markets and shopping was fruitful. I was surprised by a stall vendor who appeared from under the table of her wares and didn’t get any taller for being free from underneath. I felt like a giant. I bought some souvenirs from her and she kindly agreed to have her photo taken with me in her perfect English spoken with a bright smile.
A walk around the town, towering over the locals, brought us through the cheese, meat, fruit, vegetable and etc markets. I was amazed at the precarious balancing act of three or four levels of dozens of kinds of beans, chilis, rice, corn and grain, with narrow corridors and shoppers with bags full pushing past each other without knocking a sackful of giant corn or beans to the ground. The colours, noise and that pungent, unique-to-markets kind of smell completed the experience and put me in mind of Oaxaca and her stalls full of mole (the wet, spicy sauce base, not a character from Wind in the Willows) and queso…only thing missing was fried worms and crickets. This omission was made up by dead chickens, heads, feet and all. It was a deep lungful of air I took in when we stepped out of there.
A handful of us enjoyed views over the plaza from an excellent fourth floor Mexican restaurant with beers that required two hands to lift the bottle. I found out later that regular size bottles are available, but I do like the Ecuador style of defaulting to grande!
The Tucan truck continued onto Quito in the mid afternoon and I said a sad farewell to the friends I’ve made and to the truck…bittersweet for the truck though – I can’t deny that while the company was mostly excellent, the long days, heat, swaying and slow-going nature of an overland truck will probably not become friends with my hip joints. Steve and I went shopping for that perfect piece of jewelry for his girlfriend back at the markets, I picked a pendant out from sitting inside a ring and he was taken with it too. Sometimes you just know. We shared a taxi ride through torrential rain in the afternoon to Tababela – the site of the new Quito Mariscal Sucre airport so he could go onto the USA and I could surprise a very special person who came back to me.