We gave our hosts a break from us, and headed North to Otavalo, which is a town in the mountains, with the biggest crafts market in latin america.

Terrified by the prospect of loads of fat americans haggling rudely over 50 cents with tiny indiginous weavers, we headed for the hills and spent 4 days walking in the Andes. There are loads of lakes and volcanoes, its very cold, and its so high up that we had trouble climbing one volcano which was 4100 (Fuya Fuya) because we were out of breath after 10 metres of walking.

we bought some tat at the market and now I have a llama jumper and Damian has a chess set where the pieces are Spanish versas the Incas.

Its an amazing place to walk becase there are so many volcanoes you can see in every direction, although the cloud is kind of thick at the moment.

Traditional Ecuadorian Food from the mountains is really heavy!

a common dish is goat stew, or chicken soup. but they also seem to really like a dish that has all of the following piled up together: fried maize, boiled maiz, fried pork fat, fried eggs, sausage, mashed potato, and spicy sauce. Its tasty but presumably will kill you eventually. they drink a strange juice made of maiz (yes more maiz) and oatmeal flavoured with pineapple. its kind of like food in a glass and is a bit grim.