Otavalo Day 4

Sunday May 29.

Today we just poked around and went to some of the surrounding villages to check out what they produce, like various weavings, hats and leather. Not a super eventful day and really a clue that maybe we stayed to long at this spot.  It's so hard to know when planning ahead and planning ahead is what we have been doing with the kids along. It works out 95% of the time.

I did catch this fine dog pack image. The dogs are everywhere. The are not ratty and nasty as you might expect, but some seem to be even very well groomed. From what we understand, most of the dogs have a home, they just get to wander and hang it with their buddies all day. We have only met one mean one. He was on the way down to town from the place we are staying. Pretty vicious sounding. Even chased one of our cabs up the road sounding like he was going to tear the tires off. Patti has been at Def Con 1 ready to give that dog the old monkey kick.

We had a laundry fail here. Or, as Patti might relate it, I had a laundry fail here. We all had one change of underwear left and needed to do laundry for obvious reasons. We have a clothesline that we pack and are usually in a constant state of laundering something. But this trip we have used more laundry services than in the past. I guess we are getting old.

We inquired at this hostel and they let us know that they had no machines and it was all by hand and line dried. Fine with me, but Patti, who has been watching the weather, put out her warning that we should find machines in town as we had more than the usual load this time. I insisted that we not spend our vacation in the laundromat. In the room was one thing but waiting around seemed like no fun.

We gave them our laundry on the first day and to make a long story short, it was still wet when we got it back. Oh well, back to hanging it around the room.

For lunch we found a tucked away place in Cotacachi where I thought I would try out the Google Translate app. I had looked at this about 5 years ago, among other apps, and it was limited in terms of what it could do offline. They have made great strides now that you can download language packs for offline use. The language pack will take English speech as input and convert it to Spanish text without needing a data connection. When on data it will spit out a verbal translation as well. Pretty cool.

It also has an offline character recognition and conversion function that works with your camera. I thought the Cow Fat sounded just delicious.

We were going to stop here for lunch, roadside Guinea Pig. Literally, this rotisserie was right on the side of the road, I took this pic from the car window. Nothing like some road dust and CO to season the little fella.

Before we wrapped it up for the evening we spent some time talking with Jose, the owner, about his place. He said that it took him 10 years to construct the Hotel. It sounded like a painstakingly slow process where many folks in community were involved. After that discussion it was very easy to look around at other places that almost look abandoned and understand that they are really just undergoing a glacially paced construction.

Oh, by the way, if you have not already figured this out, I have been posting pics with links to the albums on the right side of the blog page.

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