Laguna Mojanda, Cuicocha and Otovalo

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2 weeks in and I am definitely getting better. The last week of spanish had let in a few rays of light I was looking forward to getting away again and practicing a bit more. This time we had a group of around 6 poeple though and everyone could speak better spanish than me so negotiating prices at hostels was not going to be my job. Oh well, maybe next time.

We decided to leave early Saturday morning instead of leaving Friday afternoon and saving a nights accomodation. This worked out really well after we rolled into Otavalo and found the Saturday markets just getting into full swing. First we all had some desayuno before hitting the streets and grabbing some bargains. Davide and I both wanted to buy some paintings after seeing how great they were on the way into town. Lucky for me his spanish is great and after visiting a few stalls we both walked away with some great bargains.

Matthius, our Swiss friend who is harder to locate than a needle in a haystack, at this stage was getting restless about spending too much time in the markets so we all got together and set out for some hiking. Luckily for us we found a truck that could fit 6 people and after 30 minutes in the back we arrived at Laguna Cuicocha. The extinct volcano crator is now full of water with a little island in the middle. Because it was late in the afternoon and we only had a couple of hours of daylight we walked nealry half way around before turning back. The visibility was unfortunately low with lots of cloud around (we were around 3300m) but at some stages it cleared for us to see the beautiful scenery in front of our eyes.

The ride back in the truck was made even more difficult with the rain but when a local villager jumped in the back with a one month old puppy that had the cutest eyes in the world we didn´t care that we were getting wet.

From what we could see there was not much happening in town that night even though it was Saturday so after a candlelit dinner thanks to a blackout we headed back to our hostal to play some drinking games. This was a successful exercise and after playing some Kings and never ever we headed out to the only place in town where we could hear some music. Unfortunately it really was a dive, but we had a couple of drinks and mixed with the local crowd before calling it a night.

Early Sunday morning myself and the 3 boys all jumped into a cab and made the rough journey up to Laguna Mojanda. The road was very treacherous and our cab driver dropped us off with around 2km more to go to the lake. He promised to return around 6 hours later at 2pm. WE HOPED!!!

The Laguna was at 3700m and nearby stood Mt Fuya Fuya, which we were trying to attempt today, which stood at nearly 4300m. The scenery was beautiful, rolling green hills surrounded the lake with some interesting plantlife still evident at nearly 4000m. The climb up to Fuya Fuya took nearly 90 minutes and a bit of rock climbing was needed near the top. The view was magnificent. After we slipped and slided our way back down we walked about 1/3 of our way around the lake before we had to turn back and make our taxi. The isolation made it all the better as we only had to share this bit of land with around 15 other people.

Our cab driver kept his promise and picked us up near the top. We were all pretty exhausted by this stage having walked around 6 hours but we were all happy about the days hiking. The bus trip back to Quito was made even better with "The Marine" being shown on the TV. What a great movie....

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Photos

On the top
Well we thought it was the top but we had to do some rock climbing on the next hill to get to the real top

Comments

[jinan]

hi مرحبا لقد اعجبني المكان كثيراً واتنى ان اعيش فيه