Goodbye Colombia.

After leaving Popayan, we headed down to a city close to the Ecuador border called Pasto. While we intended on spending a couple days there, we changed plans and just stayed one night before continuing on to Ecuador to a town called Otavalo. Before crossing the border we did stop at a church outside of Colombian border town Ipiales, famous for its unusual construction. The church was built a little less than 100 years ago across a gorge, with the main cathedral built against the gorge wall where an image of the virgin had supposedly appeared. The construction was impressive, it was a beautiful day, and after our taxi driver fixed a blowout remarkably quick, we were on our way to the Ecuador border.

Crossing the border came with the expected long line for passport stamps, and angry Germans refusing to pay for the visa extension they failed to get in Colombia, before they attempted to exit the country with an expired visa. Kadie and I however, had jumped through all the necessary Colombian hoops, so our exit was simple, and we were happy to receive a six month Ecuador visa with no problems...

After crossing the border we headed straight to the tourist town of Otavalo. Otavalo is famous for its outdoor artisan market, and it is an excellent example of how locals have created a major tourist attraction out of selling traditional style handicrafts. While this sounds great, the place is overrun with tourists, and many, if not most of the goods for sale at the main marketplace are imported from outside Ecuador and then labeled as traditional artisan work. Vendors swear synthetic fabrics are wool, making them pretty difficult to trust, and often you're told that obviously machine made products are local and handmade. But this is their chief source of income in a relatively poor country, so you can hardly blame them. Some stores do sell higher-end handmade products, but these are at a much higher price, but are much higher quality. With all this in mind, it's still a nice town (albeit cold and rainy when we were there) and the market is impressive in size and volume. In addition to cruising the markets, we visited a couple of other small towns in the area, and a local raptor park with Condors, Eagles and an impressive flight demonstration. Fortunately, we also stayed at a wonderfully peaceful, farmhouse hostel out in the country side which had horses and four of the best dogs we've ever met, all ridiculously large Argentinan Dogos. (think giant pit bull)

Before leaving Otavalo, I also did an early morning hike out to some local lakes for some great views of the surrounding area.

We left Otavalo after a few days of cold, wet weather, better prepared with some cheap Ecuadorian rubber boots, and headed for Quito. With more wet, cold weather we visited a few sights in Quito over a couple days and headed to the coast hoping for sun and warm weather.

When we arrived in the pacific coast town of Canoa, we found the warmth we wanted, but unfortunately, being in the wet season, there is still a considerable amount of rain. The town is known for its mellow surf break, but mostly we've spent the last few days drinking cocktails on the beach, fighting vicious mosquitos at night and feeling slightly awkward around the enormous number of Americans and Europeans in this tiny town. If the rain lets up today, I'm looking forward to getting out on a surfboard, but if not, maybe tomorrow. In the meantime, we're trying not to scratch our dozens of mosquito bites and looking forward to heading out to an organic farm on Monday to learn how to fish for river shrimp, make chocolate and milk cows...