Monthly Archive for August, 2005

The weekend before I started vacation, Elke, Claudia, Andrea and I went to Otavalo and Ibarra. We arrived on Friday to Otavalo so that we could get up early on Saturday morning for the market and beat all the other tourists who arrive later. It was worth it. I was particularly excited by the produce, grain, and meat market (see pics).

After Otavalo we decided to go to Laguna Cuicocha and hike around the rim of the crater. It turned into a long and somewhat frustrating hike (only because it was longer than we expected and it gets really dark right around 6pm and we were pushing it). But we had fun nonetheless. The pictures explain it all.

Then we went to Ibarra, where pretty much the only thing worth mentioning is the ice cream… which is more like a sorbet. We went to the old and famous Heladeria Rosalita Suarez. It was so amazing we went twice. I can’t even describe how great it was. MMMmmmm.

PS: Chinese food in Ecuador absolutely sucks.

Pictures…

The Otavalo market

Produce #1

Produce #2

Produce #3

Produce #4

Produce #5

Produce #6

Produce #7

Produce #8

Meat #1

Meat #2

Vendor #1

Vendor #2

Laguna Cuicocha

… Getting there

On the truck to the lagoon

Truck #2

Truck #3

… Views. You can see the snow-capped volcano Cotopaxi in the background of some of these. And we were a couple hours north of Quito, and the volcano is a couple hours south. That’s how big it is (it’s the one covered in snow, not the one with a few specs of snow on it).

View #1

View #2

View #3

View #4

View #5

View #6

… Us.

Me and Elke #1

Me and Elke #2

Our feet

Our gang

… Plants

Some nice flowers on the trail

Orange lichen?

Ibarra

Ice cream #1

Ice cream #2

What a fiasco! On the way to Puerto Lopez, we had to go through Guayaquil, catch a bus to Jipijapa, and then (hopefully) catch another bus to Puerto Lopez. Only we got to Jipijapa at 8pm, and there were no more buses to Puerto Lopez until 5am the next morning… and Jipijapa was slummy, so we had to pay a cabbie to drive us an hour and a half to PL for $25. Yikes! Then we get to PL and the hostal we wanted to stay at was booked up… we didn’t have a chance to call and make reservations… doh. But the owner was nice and he told us of a new place just down the beach that we could probably bargain a decent rate. So we ended up staying at the Oceanic which was more like a resort… I bargained the guy from $40/night to $30, which was still about $10 more than we wanted to pay. Like I said, you can’t depend on anything in Ecuador.

And then to add insult to injury, the bank there didn’t have an ATM and also didn’t accept traveler’s checks or do cash advances from a credit card. Also, I thought I had forgotten to bring my extra cash and checks… didn’t realize they were in a secondary compartment of my backpack until I arrived back in Quito at the end of vacation. “I put it in a such a secret location that I forgot where I put it.”

So we paid $45 each for a day trip out to Isla de la Plata to see the whale migrations, hike around the island to see the native birds there, and snorkel in a small coral area off the coast of the island. It was really amazing… the island is 35km off the coast of Ecuador… we saw about a dozen whales, flapping their flippers, jumping out of the water, and putting on a show… then on the island we saw 4 or 5 different kinds of birds that were nesting (see pictures and video). The snorkeling was also great… I saw at least 15 different species of colorful fish. If I have enough money, I think I’m going to get re-certified as a diver when I get to Costa Rica.

However, after paying for this trip we only had $10 left. We went to eat at a restaurant that took Visa… it was amazing… I had fried fish in a peanut sauce… Jenna had the plain fried fish… and they did us a favor by charging us an extra $10 and giving us change… so we now had $20, but we owed $60 for the lodging at the Oceanic. Ooops.

So I woke up at the crack of dawn the next morning and took a bus to Jipijapa to use the ATM there. Only I put my card in, entered my password, and selected “Fast Withdrawal” and it gave me “OUT OF ORDER”. I watched another person use it and they didn’t get any money either. So I went yet another hour farther north to Manta and found an ATM there… and it gave me the same error. What? But then I saw two other people successfully retrieve cash. So I tried again, and this time I selected only “Withdrawal” instead of “Fast Withdrawal”, and it worked just fine. I’ll never know why those options are different, and whether or not I went an extra 2.5 hours out of my way to find another ATM for nothing.

But I finally got us enough money to pay for everything and still have a good spare amount. Whew! We paid for the lodging, at some amazing shrimp, and got a bus to Bahia de Caraquez, Ecuador’s so-called “Eco-city”…

Pictures…

Our lodging

Isla: Blue Footed Booby

Isla: Masked Booby

Isla: Shoreline

(Videos coming later)

Cuenca was really nice, so we ended up staying here for 3 days. I’m still a little fuzzy on what happened when but here’s the gist of it.

Our hostal there was great… Hostal Milan. Nice and centrally located, plus the free breakfast was delicious. The owner had also recently installed a home theater projection system in the upstairs cafe and he showed a movie on weekend nights. This place was great. The only problem was the excessive street noise due to the buses in Cuenca which apparently have no mufflers.

The churches in Cuenca are gigantic (see photos) and it’s easy to see how the Spanish were able to convert people to Christianity through pure fear and intimidation. It’s amazing to me that so many buildings there are older than the Unites States. Most of the central downtown area had beautiful old colonial buildings with balconies and intricate woodwork. Very very nice.

We went to some great museums in Cuenca… especially the Museo de las Culturas Aborigenes. It contained a huge private collection of artifacts from ancient cultures. Much more impressive than the (larger) Museo del Banco Central.

The restaurants here were hit-and-miss. For the most part, the ones that my guide recommended weren’t so great… and the ones we found on our own were amazing. We ate lunch at a Colombian place called “Moliendo”. It was so yummy. I’m actually craving it right now. And another place we found was “El Maiz” which seemed to be in a renovated old house, was very nice and somewhat upscale feeling, but we ate tons of food and drinks for only $15 which was a steal.

I think it was our second day here that we tried to go to the Cajas National Park. The guide book said it “couldn’t be easier” to catch a bus on the route to Guayaquil and have them drop you off at the park entrance. However we asked around the terminal for over an hour and none of the buses would take us there. So we gave up and went back to town and hit up the local market that was in full swing. Later on, in Puerto Lopez, we ran into some Dutch girls who said they had the same problem and just got lucky when they finally found a bus to take them to the park. This is typical of Ecuador… you can’t rely on anything here.

On our way from Cuenca to Puerto Lopez, we stopped at Inga Pirca…

Pictures…

A view over the city

An interesting building

Church #1

Church #2

Big trees in the park square

A night scene from the top of the hill

My favorite painting at the modern art museum

The bathroom at the “Museum of Extreme Art” (which, we think, was really a night club)