After only about 2 hours sleep I dragged myself out of bed in the hope that myself and the other Couchsurfers I had met would make use of the day and go hiking around the base of one of the volcanos. Unfortunately they had only arrived home from the sun festival at 6:30am and would not be waking until well after lunch time. I decided to come up with a new art design for one of the other dorm rooms - A silhouette of an old man playing a trumpet under an old dingey...

This morning I decided to get up a little earlier and check out the famous Otavalo Saturday Market. At about 9am I headed down to the market square and wow what a maze of people, venders, handicrafts, foods etc. A lot of the vendors were only just setting up but that didn't matter they were all selling the same kind of stuff. On Saturday the market doesn't just occupy the main square but all the streets in and around and leading up to it. Loads of tourists were w...

Today was my day off and waking up to some sun light was a rare treat here in Otavalo. I had heard of a waterfall just outside of town called Peguche Cascadas. I read it was only an hour walk so after breakfast I packed a few things and set off for the waterfalls. On the way I stopped to watch a parade that was happening through the main streets - this week is festival week for Otavalo and there are all kinds of things happening around the city. Lots of people ar...

Today I woke up with a full blown cold, eyes watering and sneezing repetitively. I did my best to get warm but my body would not warm up. At about I continued painting and did the finishing touches on my Charlie Chaplin piece - it came out really nice in the end. The second piece I started today was a coat hanger silhouette with two hats and an umbrella hanging off it. This piece took a lot of measuring and lining up and by the end of the day I had just managed t...

Today I woke ready for a day of work - haha well what could be considered work in very laymen terms. Today I was to draw and hopefully start painting an image of Charlie Chaplin in one of the hostel rooms. After a walk around the town I started at about 10am and marked everything up and got dimensions sorted before stopping for lunch. After a long lunch I started sketching the image of Charlie Chaplin - it is here I realized how much I used to love drawing and ar...