Otavalo

Day 172 – To market to market to buy an ….. Indian headdress?

At the market before 9, we were surprised to find that the market was enormous, filling not just the central square, but at least three blocks in all directions off the plaza.  To cover this we needed a plan, that would be my job, while Erin’s job was to make sure that gifts were bought for family and friends before she could spend our remaining USDs on herself (we were crossing into Colombia later today).  It became pretty clear early on that a) we wouldn’t be able to cover the market in any kind of logical order and b) we wouldn’t be able to cover the whole thing in a day anyway!

One of the bizarre stalls, hundreds of “dream catchers” and huge Indian head dresses.  We weren’t sure who this was for, locals or tourists?  Most Western countries won’t allow feathers to cross into their borders!

Lots of silver jewellery! 

Every colour jumper, beanie, scarf or blanket you could imagine… luckily no room in our backpacks for this stuff.

Lots of interesting spices and potions for sale in the fruit and veg part.

With the shopping out of the way it was time to head for Colombia!  We flagged down a bus on the outskirts of town and three hours later we were in Tulcan.  There we teamed up with a nice (but very quiet!) Korean couple and got a cab to the border.  We just beat a big queue of people to the head of the line, but just as I handed over my passport the officer disappeared for ages to deal with some other matter.  When he finally returned he insisted that Erin and I go make copies of the ID page and Ecuadorian entrance stamp.  For some reason nobody else seemed to need to do this, but it didn’t really matter because he let us back into the front of the queue and eventually out of the country.

We walked across the bridge into Colombia where they didn’t even make us fill in a single form, just machine stamped our passport and we were on our way.  We caught up with the Koreans while they were negotiating with a taxi driver.  The driver was trying to tell them it was 20 minutes or more to the bus terminal as it was a long way out of town.  I pointed out to the driver that it was only 4km according to the sign behind him, but he insisted it was further.  We talked him down a little bit and head toward the terminal.  When we arrived 8 minutes later I suggested we should only pay half the price because it only took half the time he said, he didn’t seem amused!

The Koreans opted for a night bus to Medellín, on the other hand we decided to heed the warnings from our guidebook, travel forums, Australian Government, etc. and not travel this section during the night (apparently the road is not 100% government controlled during the night, but is heavily patrolled by the Colombian army during the day).  So we just got a minibus as far as Pasto where we could stay the night. 

About 15 minutes out of Ipiales our minibus was pulled over by a team belonging to the Colombian Army Counter Narcotics Unit.  We and some of the other passengers got patted down (pregnant ladies don’t smuggle drugs apparently) and then they performed a token search of our bags.  They never even opened the boot of the van or climbed aboard.  More interestingly they didn’t have a sniffer dog.  I’m not sure why anyone would by trying to smuggle drugs into Colombia anyways!

The USA generously fund this type of operation in an attempt to limit the amount of cocaine that finds its way to the States (to the tune of US$6.5 billion in military and police aid since 1996).  It seems to me to be a complete waste of money, our van could have had a couple of hundred kilos of cocaine in the boot, another hundred in the seats, some more in the panelling and some tucked under the blouse of the pregnant mum and they wouldn’t even have noticed. 

Another rather dubious way the Americans spend counter-narcotics money in Colombia is sponsoring the army to crop dust coca fields with herbicide.  From an environmental and social perspective this verges on lunacy.  The collateral damage is significant and the future viability of the farmland diminished.  The livelihoods they destroy are not those of millionaire drug lords, but ordinary campesinos who are simply trying to eek out a living somewhere beneath the poverty line.  Whilst on one hand US ‘investment’ in Colombia has helped the government bolster the armed forces and bring more of the country under government control, on the other hand they are creating more disenfranchised people in rural areas which only helps to strengthen support for rebel groups.

Anyway, once the army had decided that our sleeping tablets and ibuprofen were indeed what the boxes said we were allowed to continue on our way.  We got into Pasto just as it got dark and had to tell the taxi driver we had a reservation at the hotel we wanted to go to (we didn’t) in order to stop him from taking us somewhere else (where he would get a commission).  Koala Inn, although having no apparent affiliation with koalas or Australia for that matter, was a ramshackle but nice hostel set in a huge old colonial building. 

As it was Saturday night the streets were bustling and we headed out to a local restaurant for a feed.  The whole time we were in town (not that long admittedly) we never saw another gringo, it seems the hoards that descend on Peru and Ecuador do not brave the trip north over the border.