We start our day with excellent coffee, fruit, granola & yogurt, and fresh juice courtesy of Márcia, who makes breakfast for the guests (and then incredible smelling lunches for the staff.) Márcia is 42 with 3 kids, all grown up and married, and a surprise baby due in October. Luis and Elias run maintenance operations and Señora Adriana oversees everyone with a benevolent eye and mighty lungs. I thought they were all a family but in fact they just act like one.
The hotel has many high-ceilinged whitewashed rooms, extremely thick walls that keep things cool, and a beautiful inner courtyard and fountain as well as the garden. We recommend it to anyone passing through Otavalo: www.rivierasucre.com.
And you should pass through because Otavalo is wonderful. It is the heart of the most wealthy indigenous community in Ecuador. There is an animal market and huge crafts market on the weekends and a great meat & produce market all week long. We happened to hit at Inti Raymi, the summer solstice festival which goes on and on in all the small towns around the area. We had a fun evening in San Juan, a neighborhood of Otavalo, where circles of men and women played traditional music (guitar, wooden flute, mouth organ) and danced amid taffy pullers and marauding hordes in black ten-gallon hats.
Major digression on fashion: Many people here wear traditional dress. For women this means black sandals, an ankle length swath of dark fabric wrapped once as a skirt over a pale underskirt, a white blouse with lacy sleeves to the elbow and colorful embroidery, and an embroidered fabric sash. They wear their black hair long and bound with another more narrow embroidered strip. The best part is their necklaces of gilt beads, either plastic or glass. The younger women tend to wear simple graduated strands tied together at the back but the older women can have their necks completely swamped with strand upon strand of huge gold (or sometimes coral colored) beads. If they do wear an overlayer it is usually a piece of waist-length plain fabric slipped under one arm and tied over the opposite shoulder, leaving both arms free. If she isn't wearing it as a wrap the fabric is folded up on top of the woman's head. As in Bolivia women and men carry bundles wrapped in blankets tied to their backs. Men wear white sandals, white ankle-length trousers, a white shirt, and a blue wool poncho. They wear their hair long and braided and a black fedora. We have seen many little girls and a few little boys dressed traditionally, and many fewer young men than young women in traditional clothes. And, of course, we don't have the photos we would like since we resist alienating people at the end of a camera...sigh.
Mike is going to blog on the amazing festivals we have gone to in a couple of the towns near here. And soon we will move on from our wonderful perch and get out to see some more of Ecuador cast-free!
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