Ecuador... A mixed bag?

After a less than pleasant night on the bus, we found ourselves at yet another border crossing, making this the sixth one of the trip. We felt a little out of practice though, since crossing into Colombia basically consisted of getting off the sailboat, getting to our hostel, and picking up our passports later in the day from our boat captain, who handled all the border formalities for us. Our most recent experience was therefore the crossing into Panama, which some of you may remember was a total, disproportionately frustrating nightmare. So we braced ourselves and pulled out our passports and our wallets, only to basically waltz across the border with hardly any interaction with the officials, and absolutely no fees to pay. Amazing! Once done with the Colombian side, we started walking across to the Ecuadorian side, only to be mobbed by a group of men who started shouting unintelligible things at us, something about amarillo and vaccines. They kept pointing to a poster, which said something about the H1-N1 flu virus, to which we frantically responded that we dont need it, or that we already have it, whichever would make them go away! They kept insisting on amarillo, amarillo (the H1N1 poster happened to be yellow, I should point out) and they said we couldn´t get into Colombia without this vaccine, whatever it may be. After a push and pull where the men triend to convince us to come with them and get the vaccine, and we nervously exchanged glances and shook our heads and tried to push past them so we could get to the border office and see what exactly this was all about, we finally figured out that they were talking about the Yellow Fever vaccine, and that that was what we needed to be allowed into Ecuador. We breathed a sigh of relief, announced loud and clear that we already got this vaccine at home and had cards to prove it, and finally marched past them, basking in the relief of not having to get stuck by some Ecuadorian needle and injected with god-knows-what. We got to the Ecuadorian border office, wielding our vaccination cards like protective weapons, got our passports stamped, and.... thats it. Nobody so much as insinuated anything about Yellow fever or vaccinations to us at all!! Incredible. These things will just never get old.
Next we made our way to Otavalo, or rather to the farm near Otavalo where we were hoping to stay and volunteer for about a week. I had been in contact with the woman running the project, and she had said that we should just let her know when we would be arriving, and that there was work for us in the garden and at their small school. After all the moving around we had been doing, and especially after our wonderful experience on the farm in Salento (and given how awesome farming is in general) we were really excited to stay in one place, relax, work outside, and just help out and be part of something. Unfortunaly, after a couple of email exchanges, the woman at this farm (which claimed to call itseld Aroha Village) stopped responding to my emails. After three of four unanswered messages, we figured we would just write down all the information we had on them (they are listed on a website that is similar to WWOOF, and helps place people in volunteering positions around the world) and then figure out how to get there once we got to Otovalo. Well. Thats not exactly how it went. Once we got off the bus, we started asking around to see if anyone knew anything about this place, or the town where they claimed to be located. One kindly cab driver agreed to chauffeur us around for a while, and even asked several people on our behalf, to see if anyone could help. Nobody that we spoke to had heard of it, or knew anything about any of the information we had. Not one person! After about two hours of being on this wild goose chase, we had to give up, and asked the cabbie to drop us off at a hostal in Otovalo. We had done all we could. It seemed that this farm just didnt even exist. We had to cut our losses, let the disappointment set in, and go from there.
And that we did. Our hostel in Otovalo was beautifully cheap, as is the rest of Ecuador, which was quite a relief after the unexpected expensiveness of Colombia. The woman who ran the place was a truly special individual. She was English, with ruddy skin and buck teeth and everything. She also happened to have the most beautifully sculpted mullet we have ever seen in our entire lives. It was... a work of art. Very impressive. To boot, she was super weird and anti-social... let just say that she didnt seem cut out to run a hostal at all. In fact, judging by how clearly frustrated and even angry she became when we dared to ask her about anything, I would say that her job makes her quite miserable. Why people do these things to themselves, I will never understand. Anyway, we didnt exactly hang around, and as far as a place to sleep it was quite comfortable and even entertaining.
Otovalo turned out to be pretty cool. There was a huge craft market which we spend a significant amount of time browsing, and even bought some pretty gifts for ourselves and others. There were also many huge, filling, cheap lunches to be had. For US1.75 we each got a delicious fresh squeezed juice, a huge bowl of hearty soup with all kinds of veggies in it, and a steaming pile of rice, meat, and ´´salad´´. Paying seemed like a downright joke!

We also used the time to get on the internet and figure out what our next move should be. We were pretty bummed about not working on the farm, so we searched and emailed and hoped and prayed, and pretty soon we got a response from a very sweet-sounding person named Alicia at a nature reserve in the south of Ecuador. She said that they always needed help from volunteers and that we could come whenever we wanted, stay however long we wanted, and to whatever work they needed to be done at the time. Now this sounded like our kind of place. We also found some cool places in between Otovalo and the nature reserve that we wanted to visit. So we laid out a tentaive plan, confirmed things with Alicia, crossed our fingers that her nature reserve did in fact exist, and continued with out journey. Our next stop would be Salinas, a small town in the mountains that makes its own cheese and chocolate. How could we pass that up? We couldnt. After stocking up on another hefty lunch, we were on our way.