The Northern Highlands: a fine place to end

Tuesday, September 03, 2013
Otavalo, Imbabura, Ecuador
We spent the last 4 nights of our trip in the Northern Highlands market town of Otavalo. We flew out of Coca to Quito on Friday morning and boarded a bus arriving in Otavalo by mid-afternoon, allowing us to check out the market and make a few purchases before the large crowds of tourists arrived the next day for the very large weekly market.

For a fifth consecutive day, our alarm clock went off at 5:00 AM on Saturday morning as we decided to head up to the weekly early morning Animal Market where buyers and sellers were negotiating and transacting for angry cows and bulls, squeeling pigs, suffocating chickens, bags of ginea pigs, and even a few dogs .

Otavalo also makes a good base from which to check out a number of other Andean mountain communities and to hike in the beautiful surrounding hills. One such pueblo goes by the name of Cotacachi, a very laid back place where the production of low cost high quality leather goods is the name of the game and where some 400 foreigners now reside. Near Cotacachi is Laguna de Cuicocha, a beautiful crater lake that sits at 3,300 m above sea level formed by major eruptions that occurred over 3,000 years ago. We completed the strenuous 5-hour hike around the rim of the crater lake on Monday. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera memory card but I did download a couple of pictures from the internet to give an idea of the landscape.

If we had more time, we would surely explore Lagunas de Mojanda, the Intag Valley, cloud forest lodges near Mindo, the Cayambe region and Reserva Biologica Los Cedros. This is spectacular landscape with a number of interesting haciendas which would make for a great trip, so we'll keep it in mind for another time.

We will taxi directly to Quito's new airport from here at 7:00 PM tonight to catch our flight back home, a 2 hour ride allowing us to forego having to enter and spend a night in boring Quito again ... and return to Ecuador's highlands, we shall one day, seguro!

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