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We finished packing and brought small rucksacks to the bus station. The bus stations in Ecuador aren´t really stations, more like random places on the side of the road that aren´t even marked out. It´s like by word of mouth they become stations. We wandered around for ages trying to find one and then by sheer fluke got a taxi driver who used to work on the buses. He brought us to someone out in the middle of nowhere where we got on the bus that took us here. The bus took 3 hours and the bus driver drove like a maniac around mountain passes.
We got off the bus and got a taxi to the hostal. The taxi driver offered to be our chaffeur for the weekend and gave us his number, he´s called Jefferson.. very ecuadorian name. We got to the hostal which wasn´t too bad and phoned him 10 minutes later to take us to the Condor Park. He showed us the different volcanoes on the way up, including a naturally formed heart shaped gully in the side of one of them. He also gave us a good price to the park. The Condor park was class, but a bit depressing as the cages the birds were kept in were tiny - like the size of a kitchen if they were lucky. There were lots of different types of hawks and eagles, and vultures. We saw an exhibition with this large eagle that clearly wasn´t that well trained, it kept looking like it was going to just fly away like we wanted it to. After the exhibition we saw a condor. It was in the back of its cage and then flew towards us which was a bit..suprising. Matthew jumped back without even thinking of poor Lisa. It was a lovely bird and gigantic. We had seen two of them at Cotopaxi, they travel in pairs, but hadn´t seem one up close.
Jeff gave us a lift home from the condor park with his daughter in the back who Lisa had to make awkward conversation with. We saw lagos San Pablo on the way back which was quite beautiful. When we got back to the hostal we had a meal in the restaurant there. It was ok but we were both not feeling great and didn´t eat half of it.
We tried to get an early night but there was a guy playing flute really badly right outside our window. He knew about 3 notes and maybe two songs. At one point a bin lorry came along and we thought he had changed instrument to xylophone.. that´s how bad he was. He wasn´t even doing it for money so it´s not like we could have bribed him to move on.
We really like Otavalo. It´s a lot different to Quito. Everyone here is really friendly and its got a nice feel to it.
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