Happy Hols

Right lets see..where was I up to in my exciting travels? Ah yes, Thursday in Cuenca. It turns out that there are no tours at all on a Thursday in Cuenca. Whatever you want to visit is impossible! Naturally we ignored this rather weak attitutde and decided that if there was no tours to Chordeleg & Gualaceo on Thurs we’d go on our own so we did. Slight complication with the bus which meant we ended up in a deserted country lane in the middle of nowhere in the rain but...we finally got to Chordeleg! I bet about now you are saying “what on earth is Chordeleg?” Well, it’s a tiny town where the locals make and sell stunning silver filigree jewellery.The pieces they make are totally worth the pouring rain and rather dismal town square! Did we buy any pretty things? Yes we did. Are they for you? No they are not ;)

   After Chordeleg we went to Gualaceo which has a speacialised artisan market. Sadly the tour guides were right on this one and on Thursdays the market is closed. We walked around but without wishing to be mean there was nothing to see or do so we went back “home” and gloated over our lovely, new jewellery.

  Friday we did a city tour of Cuenca.

Blue Czech tiled roofs in Cuenca (tiles bit far from home!)

Dove House-a painter lived here and painted all the walls as decoration!

 Had a lovely guide who showed us all sorts of fascinating places we would never have seen on our own including a Panama hat museum (sounds boring but was great!) and the flower market. 

do I look fab or do I look fab in a hat?

   

Woman weaving a Panama hat   

Cuenca Cathedral

After lunch I  took Julia and my mum to the Banco Central museum. The museum was brilliant! Was quite unique to walk through exhibitions of native indians and look at photos of them in native dress whilst standing next to a local who was wearing the exact same clothes! Fancy going to a museum and seeing your clothes and lifestyle up as an exhibition?

I dragged mummy and Julia off to the big museum to see the shrunken heads. I thought it sounded really cool, they (the mature adults) did not. The truth is we did see the shruken heads and it wasn’t what I expected. They seemed unreal, like toys at first. I went up close and saw a mans’ face, I could see his eyelashes and then it hit me-this was a real person. It seemed wrong to see “people” like that. We then read that the shrunken head ritual was only ever used very rarely and only as part of a sacred justice ceremony. The heads belonged to murderers who had been executed. I looked at the faces and felt uncomfortable to look at killers and yet I also felt pity for them. It was a weird experience.

   Friday night we flew back to Quito and Saturday morning we went to the main Quito cultural museum. Here we saw Inca gold! Was fascinating to see the actual crowns etc that I’d seen in guide books etc. Don’t want to sound like the guide book but the craftmanship was amazing. You should all come to Ecuador and see all these things J You’ll love it honest!