Shopping Spree

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DAY 6: A rooster crowed around 5am and wouldn’t stop until we had no choice but to get up.  Navid sat in his bed all groggy-eyed.  “I hope that rooster ends up in a cock fight today.”

Once an empty city on a Friday night, Otavalo becomes a jammed marketplace on a Saturday morning.  Villagers from near and far set up their stands to sell anything and everything, from fine alpaca woolen hats to fresh pig heads.  Gringos come to these markets to bargain the former and cringe at the latter.

We started our wanderings of the famous Otavalo markets at the animal market which—you guessed it—is where you can buy live animals for meat, pets or sexual-deviant things whose pictures require adult ID checks on the internet.  A crowded area with cow and pig feces everywhere, villagers came to sell their livestock.  The sounds of pig squeals and cow moos filled the air, with an occasional “baaaa” from a sheep. 

Interested in the price of really fresh beef and pork, I used my limited Spanish to ask around prices.  Cows run about $120-$150 while pigs range from $25-$30 (US)—although those prices are probably marked up since they figured I was a gringo.  But think of all the hamburgers and pork chops!

Navid and I went off to the food market, full of many different fruits on one side, and meats on the other.  It was sort of like a supermarket without the annoying Musak or pimply-faced teenage cashiers. 

The meat “department” could make any carnivore a vegetarian; I saw sheep carcasses without the heads, chicken heads without their bodies, cows’ eyes and piles of various unrecognizable cow pieces that I’m guessing will eventually end up in a hot dog somewhere.

At the Plaza des Ponchos, we wandered the rows and rows of stands selling woven goods.  Navid bargained down a woven alpaca woolen hat from $6 to $3.50, while I went browsing for other hats.  I recalled an episode of Globe Trekker when Justine Shapiro was at these same markets buying a genuine Panama hat (made in Ecuador but made famous by Panama) and I saw many stands that sold them.  But I noticed that none of the locals wore them, and they were a total tourist thing.  So I decided to buy one of the hats that the locals wear, a short-brimmed fedora, and bargained one down from $10 to $6.  I wore the fedora in attempts to blend in with the indigenous people, but it was no mistaking I wasn’t from around there when either Navid or I busted out our big SLR cameras or mini-camcorders.

THERE’S ONLY SO MUCH PRETENDING TO SHOP you can do, so we pretty much just had a lazy afternoon, just wandering town and its Plaza Bolivar, and hanging out in the backyard of the hostel.  I lay in a hammock reading a book while Pablo, the happy adolescent son of the family-owned hostal, was using a hair dryer to start a fire on a grill.  He and his friend Christian grilled up some platanos, which they shared with us.  Nancy, the little 9-year-old daughter that we met the night before, was just playing around and we shot some hoops with her at the small basketball court.

The Otavalo markets pretty much died down by 4pm when all the gringo daytour buses leave.  Most of the other stores closed by 7pm and there wasn’t much to do.  We went to the meat market for dinner and found a place that served cuy, deep fried guinea pig—an Andean delicacy famous in Ecuador.  Say what you will about eating rodents, but I’m of the mentality that anything that is fried must taste good.  To avoid the clich’, “tastes like chicken,” I’ll say that it’s chicken that tastes like cuy.  I recommend you go out to the pet store and get some now, before Colonel Sanders catches on.

We went out to a couple of bars for drinks to kill time until the nighttime cockfights, at a small arena near the meat market, which is a pretty convenient place for a cockfight arena if you ask me.  The crowd of locals and a handful of gringos sat around the ring to cheer on their favorite rooster.  Owners brought their birds to the ring and had them taunt each other, until they were let loose to fight to the death—sort of like Pokemon but with a lot more blood and no weird animals called “Squirtle.”

The cockfights went all night, but the period of time in between fights for preparation and betting was excruciatingly long (about half an hour), and we left after two fights.  We never did find out if one of the losers was the one that woke us up so early that morning.


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This blog entry about the events of Saturday, October 25, 2003 was originally posted on October 26, 2003 on the blog, "The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around The World (Or Until Money Runs Out, Whichever Comes First)," hosted by BootsnAll.com. It is one of over 500 entries that chronicled a trip around the world from October 2003 to March 2005, encompassing travel through thirty-seven countries in North America, South America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. It was this blog that "started it all," where Erik evolved and honed his style of travel blogging. (It starts to come into focus around the time he arrives in Africa.)

Praised and recommended by USA Today, RickSteves.com, and readers of BootsnAll and Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree, The Global Trip blog was selected by the editors of PC Magazine for the "Top 100 Sites You Didn't Know You Couldn't Live Without" (in the travel category) in 2005.





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