POST 4- QUILATOA

Hola!

We are settling in quite well to our new existence in the Andes- Adele is already working in the hospital and I have tested my prospective students, ready to start lessons with them this week. As I mentioned in my last blog the village, Zumbahua, really is in the middle of nowhere, but once a week it´s market day (Saturday) and all of a sudden it´s absolutely heaving. It starts at 3am and it´s how I imagine markets used to be once upon a time in Europe- the farmers from miles around come with potatoes, rice, maize, apples, cows, pigs, chickens, llamas, sheep, shoes, hats, ponchos and all sorts of other wares, dragged on a rope or bundled up in enormous packs on their backs or in rusty old pickup trucks. I´ve been given the job of going to the market and getting the fruit and veg for the week, so I suppose I´ll get to know the people there quite well in the end. The meat stalls sell ALL of the animals that have just been chopped up- the first stall has a huge pile of chicken breasts, then legs, then so on down to the feet, and the same for the other animals. There are also a lot of stalls selling soup and grilled guinea pigs, but in after the market packs up the whole square is full of bits of bone (I guess the dogs clean it up?).

Yesterday and today we had our days off, so yesterday we took a pickup truck up to Lake Quilotoa, which was amazing- it´s an extinct volcano with a huge lake at the bottom of it. After a rustic lunch of giant corn-on-the-cobs and a slab of local cheese we got another lift down to the village of Chugchilan with an American couple who were headed in the same direction. Chugchilan is a lot better off than our village due to its proximity to various tourist attractions like the ´cloud forest´, and it showed- the place was a lot less ramshackle than Zumbahua (and a lot less cold, as it´s a bit lower down). We stayed the night there in a fairly fancy (for us) place with a log fire, but the bus left at 4am to come back to Zumbahua (!) so we decided to have a lay in and walk it instead. 5 hours later and we´ve just got back home- the scenery was spectacular, we only passed about three people along the way (luckily we could ask them if we were going the right way!) and now we´re shattered!

Hope everyone is well, look forward to hearing from you all soon!

Love Ross (and Adele)