Quito to Columbia - A Spot of Shopping - 18 June 2003
More markets? Is Hippy being masochistic?
A meeting on the highway, not.
Final leg of Ecuador
Tulcan play at this game
Middle East, Sudan, Zimbabwe (and Central London) pale into insignificance
More markets? Is Hippy being masochistic?
We set off to Otavalo in a bit of a hurry once we'd got stuff on the bike sorted out. There is (another Ecuadorian) market there and it's listed as a highlight. We just had to be there on a Saturday. Believing our guide book and taking heed of its advice we aimed to arrive early on the Friday before all the rooms got taken. Of course, this meant that we did not pay sufficient heed to road signs and missed the opportunity to get a photo shoot at the Ecuadorian Equator monument jobby. Oh, I can imagine the Webmaster's photo caption now. "Line of latitude, so good they named it twice" or some such. Mind you we missed the photo shot on the way South in Northern Kenya, we wouldn't want to be continentally prejudiced.
We got what was seemingly one of the best rooms in the hotel with a little balcony that overlooked the street in which the market was destined to take place. The market seemed pretty much in full swing to us, with a full square of tourist stuff and a few streets worth of fruit and veg just up the hill. We'd seen before the swelling of markets fro market day and so were full of excitement for the morrow.
The ladies of the town were in rather smart outfits as I saw it, which were a lot more flattering in the buttockly challenged department than the traditional outfits of Peru and Bolivia. These ladies had full length straight wrap round skirts it subdued tones of dark blue or grey, with a cream insert down the side for ease of walking. With a matching dark shawl and head wrap affair, contrasting with ornately embroidered puffy white blouse. Their long hair tightly wrapped in a single braid. The clothes looked easy to wear and sophisticated. The men were equally stylish with crisp white cotton slacks, white canvas sandals and usually a large slate grey poncho topped off with a rather spiffing hat. As we sat in the square and watched two young women in traditional gear and two children huddled on a park bench giggling over a photo album that one of the women had, I could have transposed the scene to any set of 18 year girls in the UK laughing over the expressions of friends and family in photos.
We encountered a new selling style. Lovely softly spoken ladies start chatting and then produce their wares. This in itself is commonplace, but they have become wise to the fact that a lot of travellers to Ecuador are likely to be into fair trade and hand made goods and a laminated picture of themselves hand weaving the articles materialises. My helmet off to them, I know I would rather part with my cash to someone who produces the products themselves than some middleman and I am sure it is a strategy that has boosted trade. The cynic in me wondered if she had posed with a loom a bought the work off an old dear she had ripped off. I hope not - if so I was suckered! Hippy, tsch, how can you be so cynical.
For some reason that is totally unlike me, I had a spending head on.
Wonders will never cease.
I had mentally prepared myself for the likelihood of parting with cash. We had not bought any souvenirs since Bolivia and this was meant to be the place to do it. This then poses many problems for a spendthrift like me:
what to buy?
what to pay for it?
how many to buy?
can we carry it with us?
will it be easy to send home?
how much will that cost?
do we want something typical or more unusual?
etc. etc.
For those of you that are accustomed to buying things on a regular basis you may not understand why this may send my mind into a state of flux but for me this was stress. Ask Esther for confirmation. Or me.
The market had sent tendrils of stalls out from the main square down the adjacent streets and most of the streets were closed to traffic. In the morning we wandered for an hour or so get a feel for what was on offer. All this did was to add more alternatives to the buying options and confuse me even more. This number of gringos milling about was growing by the minute. The ones that made me smile were a group of about 15, who were obviously on a guided trip, as they gathered at the corner of the main market square to listen to their guide. What a guide can say in this situation is limited to the obvious "This is the market" "People sell things from stalls", "Over there someone is buying something", what else can you say? His clients looked all a little lost, half an hour later when we had wandered a bit and got back to the same corner we noticed most of them had not moved. Somehow the thought of going round a market in a pack of 15, seems to defeat the purpose to me. Each to his own I suppose, or maybe it was a group of spend-aholics out on an intensive therapy session.
A meeting on the highway, not.
We had made an arrangement to meet Ricardo and a welcoming committee of other bikers that was heading to the border to meet a British biker coming South from Colombia, at 10. It seemed like a nice idea to meet him, a) to be reassured that it is possible to traverse Colombia safely, b) to give us tips on places to go c) to give us tips on how to squeeze sponsorship out of companies for our charities (according to his website he is doing very well so far). Pat went off to the appointed meeting point at 10 while I took up residence on the balcony and tried to get some decent people photos. It was nice to just people watch
Even though I knew I was a bit behind time as I arrived at the junction at 10:10, I had taken a book with me as I know by now that a time given in anywhere else in the world other than anally retentive England can be relied upon to be inaccurate. I kind of read a half page and then looked down the road to the corner which I reckoned was about half a page of reading time for a motorcyclist riding away (if you see what I mean). Thus did I manage to see every vehicle that passed on the PanAmerican.
.... After about an hour... no Pat....maybe they had meant 10am Ecuadorian time
Thatís quite a few vehicles so far
.....An hour and a half....wonder if he's OK
Thatís a huge amount of vehicles. I ponder whether there would be more or less on other days. Is it because itís a market day? Regrettably I finished my book. Otherwise I could have stayed all day watching cars, lorries, motorcyclists and the odd ice cream tricycle going past. I presumed as the final page turned that there had been some change of plan.
......2 hours I spot him coming down the road.
A quick trip to the internet revealed no messages to suggest that plans had changed. Had I really arrived too late to see Ricardo et al go past? Oh, well, it would be my fault then for assuming they would be at least 10 minutes late.
We went for coffee and cake to decide what we were going to buy, and on bargaining strategy. I love bargaining, it's all a game. They say something, you both know this is not the real price and the game begins! But for me I like to have a goal price in mind, for me what is it worth. I know that an Ecuadorian may get it for less and an American may pay more, but we should all walk away content that we have paid a fair price for ourselves.
We wandered, we bargained, we parted with cash. I then returned to the room in feeling a little odd. My heart rate had risen, I was a little light headed, I could not resist the urge to add up what we had spent....I then felt guilty. This is a normal Hippy reaction which I am aware is totally abnormal!
I would walk it off and we went for a circuit of the fruit and veg markets, which was now bustling like a fertile ants nests. The covered market was a warren of stalls selling everything from, fresh roses to toilet roll, pig carcasses to plugs and beans to baby clothes. The chaos was rationalised into areas. We found ourselves in the meat section. Warning to vegetarians jump to next paragraph. Rather sweet severed heads of sheep and goats, sat in neat rows on the counters, cows livers lobbling on scales, all manner of cuts from tiny scraps to full carcasses hung on hooks dripping fresh blood onto the floor, for a couple of scavenging dogs to tidy up. It was a carnivoreís delight! Conveniently round the corner was a medley of lunch stalls, offering rather tasty looking pigs of both guinea and swine varieties.
This market is meant to have been a regular event since pre-Inca times and walking around much of the fresh produce hasn't changed much and for a few seconds you could con yourself that this culture, with people in traditional dress buying produce for the week ahead had not moved on, until you spot the lady on a mobile phone and the butcher with a portable TV to watch in the quiet moments. Later that evening sat in the internet caff three ladies in their mid twenties, in full local dress sat teaching each spreadsheets. It is all too easy for outsiders sometimes to assume that tradition means that things do not move forward. The people had all the sophistication of women in the West (what a stupid term, Ecuador is more west than England but we are part of the 'West" and they are not - how does that work then). Maybe it is time to pull down the preconceived ideas about cultures especially now that ìthe netî is covering and uniting the world. Eh, George?
Talking of the net, we spent a bit of time writing up the journal in the evening and so we checked up on the email messages. There was one form Ricardo explaining that the plans had changed and he would not be able to make it. Timed at about 4 'o clock in the afternoon, it explained that the English guy had arrived in Quito the previous night and so they had decided not to go to the border to meet him. Hence I could have been stuck waiting for them, from 10 'til 4 in the afternoon. Good thing my book ran out and I had returned to base!
The next day souvenirs in tow, we headed north to the border. There was a crater lake off to the west of town, so we made a mini diversion to take a peek. The weather and clouds cover did nothing to reveal its supposed beauty, but it was worth going to see the people on their Sunday binge. It was clear that after the Saturday market the thing to do was to get totally wrecked, whether this was in celebration due to the excess of profits or commiseration we will never know, but everyone in the surrounding villages was pretty much out of it, this meant an unusual hazard on the road. Men weaving their way homeward or barward in the middle of the road. Trying to second guess which way the next stagger would take them was an art form. Watching for slight clues of movement only to be foiled by a sudden lurch in the opposite direction. I know now how goal keepers feel watching a player approaching to take a penalty. It could be said that the average striker has a purpose to his stride though whereas these guys were certainly random.
The rain began and a brief stop in Ibarra for coffee we decided to head for the border town of Tulcan.
Tulcan is being improved. It was hard to tell exactly which facet of the infrastructure was being amended, but it involved the excavation of all of the roads in the town centre. Now I've done a bit of this in my time and I claim to have a bit of an inkling about how it should be undertaken so as to progress the works as quickly as possible without troubling the general public too much. Clearly the second factor had not been taken into consideration here. In fact it looked as if a very excellent job was being made of road reconstruction ñ excavating away the old road to a depth of about a metre and recommencing from the bottom. Thus was it difficult to get around town. No ramps had been put in to give access from the ìlowî streets to the ìhighî streets. No diversion signs were in place. It was, as we say, a MacAlpine job. Ouch. With a great deal of help from pedestrians we eventually found our way although it was hard to believe their instructions at times. Being sent on a diversion across 6 blocks in a gridded town is unusual. As we passed big holes in the ground, we could see that the obvious problem of water collection had not been tackled and that huge muddy patches were developing. May be there is a job for me here.
Tulcan in famous for 2 things; its cemetery and a mad ball game. Both, in fact, are mad. The cemetery has the most excellent collection of topiary. Other than that it is very similar to many other South American cemeteries. (See Sucre, Bolivia entry) What was rather splendid, though, apart of course from the very fine trimmed hedge figures was the fact that the local youths used the high mausolea for a vantage point to watch the footy. They lay on top of a 6 deep wall of bodies encased in concrete to watch their favourites battle it out on a dusty pitch. Makes railway locomotives stopped on top of the Burnden Park Embankment loom relatively mundane.
As for the ball game. Well. I made mental notes of the dimensions as they are reasonably important. There seemed to be four players on each of two opposing teams, although there were so many random folk wandering about the pitch at times it was hard to tell. Each had a bat roughly the same length as a tennis racquet but with a trapezoidal head of roughly 14 inches by 16 inches. When I was offered one of the bats to hold, I judged it's weight to be about 7 pounds, much of the weight deriving from fifteen 2 and a half inch cones of rubber fabricated from lorry tyres attached to the face.
Since the pitch was something like a double length tennis court with no net in the middle, the service took a really huge thump and the poor server had to whirl their bat around about four times to summon up escape velocity for the ball. They then thumped the large rubber ball back and forth in a bewildering pattern that seemed to end when the collective players could no longer keep the projectile off the ground. A referee stuck a sharp stick in the ground somewhere near the middle as if to mark distance gained as per American football. I knew that if I asked for an explanation it would go over my head in the same way as those comic descriptions of cricket. Judging by the players, it is a game best played when drunk which is probably why the rules are so confusing. Fits well with general Sunday drunkeness.
Middle East, Sudan, Zimbabwe (and Central London) pale into insignificance
I managed to find a final box of Chilean wine (you never know whether the next country down the road will purvey such relative luxuries) and so managed to lull myself into a restful sleep.
I on the other hand was getting more and more apprehensive about entering Colombia. So many people had tried to put us off, and many others simply had decided to miss it out by flying over the top. I knew that probably more than 99% of people in Colombia are nice upstanding citizens but all it needs is a couple of crack-pots (Not sure of the etymology of the word crack-pot but I'm sure it predates the usage of the words crack and pot in their drug related forms but an interesting coincidence given the Colombian context. Nice one, Hippy) to set up a blockade and at minimum rob us and at worse commission the bike and kidnap us. Would luck be with us or not? We had taken the precaution of emailing a friend back home to contact the foreign office if we stop answering emails ñ mostly in jest but with a serious undertone. We had entered many other countries that had a bad press and had found the information to be either melodramatic or false. Would Colombia be different?
Thinking it may be easier to post our souvenirs in Ecuador and not have to carry and explain the package over the border. We did not! When the postage amounts to nearly 150% of the value of the contents it senses a little rediculous. The owner of the hotel assured us that everything in Colombia was cheaper so we'd be better off posting it over the border, filling up with petrol, buying films and anything else we could think of.