Ibarra

Tuesday 1st March 1988

We were up at 07:00 hrs. but we decide against going up to the lake because the low, dark clouds blanketed the surrounding hills. Instead, Hannes and I had breakfast in “El Triunfo” and then we jumped on a minibus to Ibarra, which cost us 30 Sucres. Ibarra is a city in northern Ecuador and the capital of the Imbabura Province. It lies at the foot of the Imbabura Volcano and on the left bank of the Tahuando river. It is about 70 kilometres (43 miles) northeast of Ecuador's capital Quito.

It was a half hour trip along a decent road through green, hilly, cultivated terrain. In Ibarra we walked around the market which sold practical items for the locals rather than craft work. There were a lot of fruit and vegetables, grain and pasta, and a nasty butchered meat section which sold easily recognisable chunks of dismembered animals. All the vendors were short stocky indigenous Indians with plaited ponytails.

The rest of the town was a non-descript mixture of modern shops on a Spanish colonial grid system of streets (avenidas and calles). There were a lot of nylon bags, baseball caps with American badges and cheap Japanese radio cassette players.

In the main plaza children in red blazers clambered over the central statue. In one building off the plaza we marvelled at some electrical wiring that would give a British Health & Safety Inspector apoplexy!

We then had a couple of cokes and wrote postcards in a small café. By 11:30 hrs. we had seen enough of Ibarra, so we jumped aboard a bus back to Otavalo. Hannes was not feeling so good, so he went back to bed.

I located the Post Office, but it was shut for lunch, so I returned to the hotel at 13:00 hrs. to write some more postcards. I went out later to post my letter and cards, finding the Correos (Post Office) in a grand white building on the main square.

Here the man in the booth accepted my pictorial aerogramme but said that he had no stamps for postcards. I had a couple of cheese rolls in “El Triunfo” and watched an Ecuadorian Army recruitment advert on the fuzzy black and white television.

There seem to be a big recruitment drive on at the moment, with lots of posters up in town. The message seems to be “it’s a man’s life in the Ecuadorian Army.”

The town was very quiet with just a few Indians chatting on street corners and dogs chasing each other around the concrete mushrooms in the Plaza de la Ponchos. These tall concrete mushrooms form the basis of the Saturday market.

They were about seven feet tall with a flat circular disk forming and umbrella at the top. There were four protruding pegs to hand things on just below the top disk. On the floor there were four curved concrete arcs, which if pushed together would form a concrete ring.

It was really quite boring, so I bought a bog roll (roll of toilet paper) for a bit of excitement and went back to my room to start reading “The Clowns of God” by Morris West. The premise of this 1981 book is “What would happen if members of the Roman Curia discovered that the Pope was about to publicly state that he had received a private revelation that the world was about to end, that an apocalypse is coming at any moment? Is he a madman, as his cardinals suspect, a mystic, or a fanatic grasping for an unholy power? The "Clowns of God" are children who are mentally or physically handicapped. The French have given them that name and feel that these children are especially close to God's heart.

The silence was only broken by the odd passing vehicle and the chirruping of a lone bird in the tree overlooking the yard. I spent the rest of the afternoon going through my diary and marking the hotels that I had stayed at in the South American Handbook, a strangely absorbing task which took me up until 19:00 hrs.

Then, Hannes called for me and together we went into town to eat. We had the house special in the Tuparino Restaurante, served by a happy deaf man who communicated with sign language and mime. The interior of the place was pleasantly decorated in wood with an internal thatched roofs over each table and local art.

We got stuck into the beers and got talking to the proprietor’s wife. Quite a few local indigenous Indians came in for take-away food, waiting patiently in their navy-blue shawls and turban-like scarf wraps. We asked about the local music which was playing in the restaurant, and this led us to buy some music cassettes by the local group for 600 Sucres.

We polished off quite a few litres of Pilsener before shaking hands with the owner and saying “adios” to the other customers. The owners children still scampered about, playing on the floor as we left to return to the hotel and our beds.