Early morning Saturday the 5 march we got out of Hostal San Blas and got on the Trollebus that took us to a bus station. from there we asked around and got on a transfer bus to another bus station. This turned out to be Quitos northern central station and Saturday being the first day of holiday(carneval) it was absolutely PACKED with people. We estimated a 3 hour plus wait just in the queue. We started asking people it

they wanted to shear a Taxi with us, and would you believe it; we found 3 norwegians that were also going to Otavalo. $12 dollars and 2 hours later we arrived Otavalo, a small indigenous town worldknown for its Saturday marked.

Got a nice room at a quiet hostel for $5 per night, good value! Walked around on this huge indigenous marked for some hours and bought some incredible Alpaca stuff! Softest wool ever, I imagine that if heaven was touchable it would feel something like the Alpaca carpets. Walking around this marked, packed with indigenous andeans, alpaca, kids and animals (the indigenous kids are the cutest I´ve ever seen) was definately a great experience. Even though it was raining, we went up to "parque condor", a park which hosts carnivore birds: Eagles, owls, hawks, falcons and the condor. No free flight show because of the weather but we still got to see some amazing birds up close. Amongst them the snow owl, white headed eagle, and the condor. The condor is one of the biggest flying birds, with a wingspan up to 3.5 meters. Incredible to see them up close.

Sunday morning we packed our stuff again and headed for the bus station in Otavalo, this time heading for carneval in Ambato. Along the way we decided to try to hitchhike our way down instead of taking a bus. So we started walking along the panamerican highway(sometimes no bigger than a small norwegian E6) heading south. First pickup truck took us about 5km down the way. Next car we got at an awful spot for hitchhiking, in the middle of a curved road going up a mountain. It was an old wearedout Mazda, but the guy gave us a lift all the way down to Cayambe. Next was a pickup truck which took us about 3 kms. As you can tell, this would take quite some time, going all the way down to Ambato step by step like this. But the story suddently changed when we got picked up by a group of mountaineers who just came back from a summit attempt at the volcano Cayambe. They were to drop us off at a junction 1,5 hours down the road, but when we realized we were heading in to Quito we asked them what was going on. It turned out that something was lost in translation(we were not going to Quito), and this something was that the driver actually was heading our way: Ambato! And he intended to take us there after dropping of his climbing buddies in Quito. ¡Que buen suerte! Good luck helped us getting all the way to Ambato before nightfall. Thank God for nice people! The prices are high here because of the carneval, so we got an awful hostelroom for $15 per night. Our first impression of this city was quite bad, dirty and lots of people, drunkards and so on. But when we went out to join to carneval festivities our impression changed dramatically! The main street was packed with happy people, dancing, singing and spraying a bubblegumsmelling foam at each other. We didn´t see any other white people here the whole night, and the consequence of being "gringo" was that we got soaked in foam from about everyone that saw us. After a few beers and watching some concerts, trying to avoid being sprayed down completely(impossible), we bought some foam ourselves and started firing back at the locals. After emptying altogether 4 cans of foam we realized that the battle was over and that we were the loosers. Kind of like the 300 spartans fighting 200000 persians, we were two norwegians against 5000 ecuadorians: Good fun.

Now we´re sitting at a internetcafe writing this, and tonight is the last night of carneval and it will definately be fun to see what will occure. We´ll probably go to bed smelling bubblegum tonight as well..