The way back from the Galapagos Islands was quite long, as we had a long stop in Guayaquil. We spent a night there and the following day took our next flight to Quito, from where we directly headed to Otavalo.

Otavalo is a small town north of Quito, famous for its colorful Saturday market. Luckily for us, we arrive there on a Saturday 🙂 The market is on several streets and the particularity is that most of what is sold there is really full of colors!
From handmande traditional tissues, paintings, music instruments and even spices!

There’s a bit of everything there and it’s really nice to walk along the different stands. Plus there’s also the food market where we could try some local food 🙂

After spending some time in the market we went for a small walk close to the city, to some waterfalls. It was really nice, kind of lost in the forest, and there was a really nice waterfall there!

We originally planned to stay only one night in Otavalo and then head to Colombia, but since we liked it there we decided to stay one more day and go for a hike on the following day.

There’s a nice hike that can be done north of Otavalo, it’s the Laguna Cuicocha. It’s a lagoon within the crater of a volcano, and in the middle of the lagoon there are two small islands 🙂

The hike was really cool! A bit longer than expected (around 14km) but the landscapes were beautiful! The lagoon is deep blue and the two islands are really nice 🙂

On the next day we eventually headed to Colombia. The border is around 4 hours north of Otavalo, but the thing is that due to the very unstable situation in Venezuela, a lot of Venezuelians leave their country and thus the border is completely saturated!

There were around 300 people from Venezuela waiting on the Ecuadorian side to go through the immigration! The thing is that there is also a “gringo line” so hopefully for us, we didn’t have to wait in the same queue and could go through the immigration quite quickly.

The same thing happened on the Colombian side, just 100m away, again more than 300 Venezuelians waiting in line to cross the immigration… That was unbelievable… It’s crazy to see so many people fleeing their country… The funny thing is that they are not stressed at all, they just wait there patiently, with a good mood, that was impressive 🙂

We eventually crossed the border and entered Colombia, from where we took a bus to Pasto, the closest city. We stayed one night there, thankfully not longer as this city was not really appealing…

On the next morning we took a bus to Popayan, a pretty big colonial city in the Cauca department of Colombia. The city is beautiful, the buildings are painted in white with a colonial style, people are really chill, it was nice to walk in this city 🙂

On the next day we went for a guided tour where we learnt that the reason why the buildings are white is because they were painted with chalk to protect them from insects that spread diseases. We learned other stories and traditions of the city, such as the holy week procession, the number of churches, the earthquake that destroyed part of the city. It was very interesting! And we could also taste a few of their specialties 🙂

Another interesting fact is that there is a hill in the city, that is actually a human-made pyramid that was built during pre-colombian times and was eventually covered with dirt and trees. And the mystery remains around why it was built…

In the next day we’ll go to San Agustin, a small village close to some archeological sites that look really cool 🙂