A two hour bus journey from Quito leads to the town of Otavalo, famous for this Saturday markets. There’s a lot more than just the markets that make this town great, there are no less than four volcanoes surrounding the area, three lakes and several small villages. It takes some hiking to get around (or grab a bus if you’re lazy), but it’s well worth spending more than just a day visit which seems to be popular with the boring tourists that invade on Saturday.
In fact the indian markets are on every weekday, occupying the Plaza de Ponchos, filled with an assortment of paintings, textiles, jewellery, food and hand crafts. It’s on Saturday that the market spills out and fill two of the main roads almost the length of the entire town. While the weekday markets are a fraction smaller, there is very little double up. The Saturday market reminds of me of Paddys Markets in Sydney where there’s very little variety and if you’ve walked down one block of stalls you’ve already seen them all. The only difference is the Saturday markets include non indian stalls, so they sell electronics and designer cloths (I’m sure they’re totally authentic!).
Otavalo itself isn’t that exciting. It’s a fantastic looking colonial town that is in the process of spending a bunch of money prettying itself up. The entire Plaza Bolivar where the town hall is located has been torn up and being repaved and new gardens planted, there’s new paint being applied to worn out walls, and even in the outlying villages I saw churches being repainted too. All this leading up to Christmas I would assume.
Surrounding Otavalo are some amazing places to trek to. My first hike was to a waterfall called Cascada de Peguche, which coincidentally enough was near the village of Peguche. I was directed by the owner of the hostel to follow the abandoned rail line to reach the waterfall. So that’s exactly what I did, which lead me through the outskirts of Otavalo, past several angry dogs (seriously, there was this poodle thing that went mental at me. Dogs aren’t as friendly here as there are back home!), past several cows that would just stare at me and kept staring as I walked by, and finally to where the road crossed over the river leading to the waterfall.
Now the only direction I received was follow the rail line. At this point the rail line went in the opposite direction, so that no longer helped. According to the tourist map this river connected to the waterfall if I followed it in that vague direction. Or I could continue on the paved road and see where that took me. Paved road or dirt by the river? Easy choice naturally, wandering to the river I found a track and started hiking my way through the forest.
It was fairy apparent this wasn’t exactly the official way to get to the waterfall. As I continued on the dirt track it lead me by a local taking care of her sheep and eventually some signs the government endorsing this route by an Indiana Jones style suspension bridge over the river.
At this point I came across the first other tourists heading to the waterfall. The briefly appeared, then headed back up the stairs they were descending from.
As I later discovered, those stairs went back to the proper trail to the waterfall, as I instead continued on jumping over swamp puddles and walking along planks of wood.
In reflection I’m sure glad I did do it this way. It was so much more of a bush walk and just that much more enjoyable than following a paved walkway. That was the official trail to get to the waterfall, a fairly boring paved path that lead back up to Peguche and about 20mins further on from where I turned off the road.
I took the paved trail to return and it must have only taken about 10mins to follow this trail back to town, and to an ice cream. I’m beginning to understand the love of ice cream in this climate. Even though it’s not insane hot, with the humidity and altitude a strawberry flavoured ice cream is heaven.
Going by the dirt trail I took to get the to the waterfall, it took more like half an hour. Three times the fun factor too.
On the 2.5km walk back Otavalo I made several mental notes to move to the other side of the road when ever I saw a dog. The couple of crazy muts made me permanently wary of dogs, and it wouldn’t be the only time I had to encounter them again.