About

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you enjoyed the site.

I started my journey to South America with the intention spending 3 months visiting many different countries life changed dramatically when I spent the 1st 2 weeks in Cotacachi Ecuador.  I started like any other tourist by visiting all of the tourist markets and buying products as cheaply as I could get them.

I bargained all of the vendors down as low as I could. Pitiful-HUH….

Then I came back to the Otavalo market one early morning and ran in to a very old lady who turned my world upside down.  I saw her sitting on the street in front of the market and she looked like she had lost her best friend. I stop to look at what she was selling and I tried in my broken spanish to communicate with her.    I asked her why she was sitting on the street selling her stuff and why she wasnt in the big market.

Her answer was stunning to me and it brought me to tears.   I bought a bunch of her stuff at the price she wanted not what I wanted to pay for it.  We talked with the help of a Ecuadorian who overheard the conversation and interpreted for me.     From the story she told me of her struggle to sell in the market without a permit because of the cost of the permit. $ 2,000 for a year…another $800 to renew it…   The average Ecuadorian family makes around $8,000 a year how could she afford a permit.

She is forced to sit on the  hot street outside of the market and to boot her husband had just passed away at the ripe age of 83 last year.  She is all alone and to think I was going to try to bargain her down on her prices>>>What a jerk…

I decided at that moment that I would try to help as many of these struggling Ecuadorians as possible.  I would not barter them down and I would only buy from outside of the main market….The very next day I ran into another very interesting weaver in the hills around Cotacachi and he was in the same situation.

My quest to help bring handmade Ecuadorian handicrafts to market at a fair price.  The local mountain people are getting screwed by the Otavalo market shop keepers.  I plan to do what I can to buy only from the little guy and sell across the world those handicrafts.   I have no idea whether my plan will succeed but I have plenty of determination and I am slowly picking up the skills on the internet to make more of these handicrafts easier to get.