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First visions of Ecuador

30 Jan

After finishing our morning’s activity of visiting the beautiful Las Lajas we decided to get out of the notably sketch border town and cross into Ecuador.  R had been doing her research and she had many fun stops planned on our way down to La Esparanza.  Our wonderful Californian friend was feeling under the weather and we were running a bit later than expected, so we decided to make only one of the stops that was only a short taxi ride away from the frontier in the town of Tulcan. It also happened to be the most amazing cemetary I have yet to see (and that’s saying quite a bit since our family has a strange addiction to visiting cemetaries).  The story behind this place is that a local artist started clipping the bushes into different designs and the town enjoyed his work so much that they decided to make it a permanent fixture and began paying him for his creativity! The cemetary is full of green animals, people, shapes and mazes.

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After wandering around the cemetary for a bit it began to rain so we decided to try our new addiction, helado de crema, and head south to La Esperanza.  We arrived in La Esperanza shortly before dinner and haphazardly found an adorable rainbow-colored, family run hostel, Refugio Terra Esperanza.  Crossing borders is one of the most difficult things that we have come across in our travels.  Not only are we saying goodbye to a country we have grown to love and finally understand, but we are entering a new culture that always seems so dramatically different.  We left our wonderful, loving, full-of-life Colombians that barter like its their jobs, and entered the quiet, on-time, shy Ecuador where bartering is much like pulling someones teeth!  We had been in a bit of shock most of the day as we moved through Ecuador, but luckily after sitting down with the family over our shared soup they quickly opened up to us and we talked and laughed the night away!

The next morning R and I got up early and decided we were going to hike up a volcano to a lake located inside the crater, we had very vague directions but we assumed there was at the least going to be a visible trail at some point to direct us to the proper volcano.  Well, we were wrong and we found ourselves climbing directly up the side of a volcano through a dense forest hoping to make it out to a big open field that we had seen from the road. We are still not sure where exactly we were meant to go, because when we exited the shoulder-high grass and flower-filled field with no path to speak of (much like the miracle R wished for) we ended up at another lake, Lago de San Pedro. But it was a fun hike with many beautiful views, so we aren’t complaining (well, at least R is not complaining loudly)!
Once we returned home we came to the conclusion that our friend was too sick and he needed to see a doctor, so we packed up our bags and left the next day for Otavalo. This just also happened to be perfect timing as it was Saturday, the day when Otavalo is known for its outdoor markets! R and I explored the market but did not get excited until we found the beautiful veggies!  Ecuador seriously has the best looking veggies I have ever seen, and they are cheap!  Vegetarian paradise.  The market and Otavalo in general is also incredibly colorful and at night all the buildings around Otavalo are lit by different colors like this amazing church!

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Otavalo is also known for its beautiful waterfall located just outside the city, Cascadas de Pugache!

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We enjoyed our hike and view of the fall before we picked up pace and headed to the majestic Laguna Cuicocha!

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This lake is very large and beautiful!  It is a nature reserve and has an island in the middle that is being studied at the moment, so unavailable for visits.  We spent our afternoon eating lunch and then relaxing and meditating by the water.  It was so calming and wonderful that we felt entirely at peace on our journey home to Otavalo.  Once at home we saw a game of Ecuador vs Colombia and in our zen trance we decided that whichever team wins the game is where we are going to spend the next 10 days waiting for G and M to arrive…. 😉

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Highway through the danger zone

29 Jan

We are behind in our blogging (again!). I blame the fact that while I had the best of intentions for my time this week, my iPad (where I write all these wonderfully entertaining updates) was left behind in a bus and I haven’t been able to inspire myself to kick H off a computer and write all this down. Also, I am quite lazy anyways. Until now that is! Under normal circumstances I would be feeling guilty and pushing H and I to get our acts together and start putting together some posts so you could all know where we are and what we are doing. But fortunately, as you may have noticed on our countdown, G and M are on their way to join us in Ecuador and that means that for two blissful weeks we will have someone else responsible for all the updates. Exactly like the last time G came to visit, we have gotten so helplessly far behind that we have even changed countries without an update. And so on this fine Tuesday I will wrap up our last days in Colombia, and H will be taking over the first week we spent in Ecuador.

The debate as to whether or not certain areas of Colombia are dangerous is endless. There are areas that have historically been controlled by a blend of paramilitaries, narco traffickers, the FARC, and other such notorious groups, and these are the ones that people have been sure to warn us about. These are also the areas nearest to the borders or the jungle, and are the exact areas we had to push through in order to get south to Ecuador. Throughout our time in the interior we were cautious and tried to be very aware of our surroundings. And nothing happened other than fun times with ridiculously sweet locals who went out of their way to help us. Then we arrived in Pasto, and our cautiousness and suspicion were greeted by very interesting locals. I have found that Colombians in general are very fond of attention, but in Pasto they would stop their car in the middle of the road and get out to pose in H’s pictures. They would also make the strangest smirk face at us in the street, and once I started to ignore the madness in favor of enjoying the buildings and they got a bit verbally aggressive in their demand for eye contact. So. Strange.

But Pasto is a very interesting city, surrounded by hills rolling into a ring of mountains. There are old buildings in various states of repair strewn through town, and the views from the church on the top of one of the hills was fairly impressive.

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In fact, there are quite a few impressive churches, gilded or painted, gothic or colonial, and more often than not full of people in various states of prayer.

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But nowhere did we come across anything scary or dangerous. Unless you include the Anorexic Style store:

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We were happy to find that the women in this town were less plastic than we had come across in other Colombian cities, but I’m not sure a trade for excessively thin anorexia is an upgrade.

The best part of our time in Pasto is finding one of our good friends from Guatape. We decided to all get out-of-town for a day trip to the Laguna de la Concha, where we trekked into some swampy tall grass around a seriously pretty lake.

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With nothing else really to keep us in Pasto, and my being fairly unsure how to react to the locals, we moved along to Ipiales, Colombia’s main border city with Ecuador. We were cautious. We had even brought a male along with us for extra security. And Ipiales was a little freaky.

We stayed in what we were told is one of the safer areas of town, which also happened to be a half block away from a red light district. Apparently no one messes with hookers, since they have their own market security by catering to all members of the male community. Our hotel asked us not to be outdoors after 10pm, to only walk on certain streets, and to be careful when we were out-of-doors. And H swears that she could both see and feel the fear in people’s eyes as we moved about. We were good, only went to the main square to get nourishment and then returned straight to our hotel for movie watching. We did get to see the ladies at work on our way back in, an interaction that surprised all three of us in how overt it all was.

The only reason to stay in Ipiales is because we wanted to see the church at Las Lajas, a nearby town. It is well-known and a huge pilgrimage site, apparently second in the world for miracles attributed to it.

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So of course I went and prayed for a miracle for us. I was picturing as many people as I could being happy, rolling through fields of flowers in love in life. That’s a pretty good miracle in my eyes… and we admired the church, its river and waterfall, and had a seriously peaceful morning. Fantastic way to spend our last hours in Colombia. Then we booked it straight across the border to Ecuador!

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