Into the Baños!

---

Hemmed in by luxuriant green peaks, blessed with steaming thermal baths and adorned by a beautiful waterfall, Baños is one of Ecuador’s most enticing and popular tourist destinations

(Lonely Planet Ecuador).

I traveled to Baños for the weekend with two of my coworkers, Jehanne a teacher from New Brunswick who arrived in August, and Joanna, one of the centre’s administrators from Ecuador. We had a great time!!! Baños is one of those places that you feel you can do anything, related to adventure sports that is, and it hasn’t become TOO touristy yet, so the landscape is still pretty unspoiled and just spectacular really!! There’s an active volcano nearby, Tungurahua, which erupted last in August 2006. The city is, however, safe since it’s surrounded by a canyon which acts as a moat.

We arrived in the middle of the night, around 1:00 am, and it was raining cats and dogs (a little idiom that I’ve been teaching in my classes… hehe) and after getting ourselves a cheap hostel, $4 a night (!), went out to party with all the other soaked locals and tourists. The next day we spend doing a bike ride from Baños through the Andean mountains stopping along the way at numerous waterfalls. Luckily, the road from Baños is the one you take the Amazon basin, so it was generally all downhill.

I LOVE THE MOUNTAINS!!! They are spectacular and being out on the road and watching it all go by was just phenomenal. Jehanne and I had to keep pinching ourselves as a reminder that we’re in Ecuador! Some of our stops meant that we had to hike a bit off the road into the bush that was starting to look quite tropical rainforesty, and others included getting in a suspended basket to be catapulted across the river far below to another waterfall. The bike trail led us off the main highway in places onto dirt roads skirting the mountains, sometimes through huge tunnels. The final destination was well worth the half hour hike out of Rios Verde (Green River) and down to the base of a huge waterfall that sprayed out from the top of a cliff into the canyon below, soaking us all!! We hitched a ride back to Baños on the back of a truck with our bikes and let all the exertion of the day melt away in the city’s municipal baths, where Baños gets its name. They were quite crowded, but really fun nonetheless!!

Our final day, we took some horses to a waterfall in the mountains. Now, as I am quite tall, horses, and I guess the stirrups they wear, are not big enough for me. I ran into this problem in Asia as well, trying to get a horse that fit me. Until I got the hang of riding again, it was, well, a bit uncomfortable as my horse HAD to be the leader and if it was falling behind, would trot up to the front again. I was able to stop using the stirrups and just used my thighs to keep myself out of danger. The waterfall was really nice and it was super-fun to ride horses!! Our guide was a really funny young Ecuadorian who laughed at our attempts to ride horses and speak in Spanish!

---

Photos

A monkey found us!
We were waiting for the basket to come back and this curious monkey hoped right on! He was very cute, but enjoyed to nibble

The Pailon del Diablo Waterfall
Phenominal Waterfall!

Trying to make an arty shadow
it´s hard when the horse has a mind of its own...

The waterfall we rode to
Yes, i wore the bandana especially for the riding.. lol

Volcan Tungurahua
It´s hard to see, but it looked really volcano-y!!

Comments

[Jehanne]

Great job!!!
I love your blog but I mostly love travelling with you! Great times and were definetly gonna have more of these here! Ciao for now!

[Christine P.]

Wow!
Hey Ian! It's good to see that you're having an amazing time! It's so weird to hear all your stories, I'm getting this weird sense of deja vu, cuz you're going to all the places that I visited (like Banos, La Mitad del Mundo, and Volcan Tungurahua!), so it's fun to relive all the experiences vicariously through you! Hey, have you gone to Otavalo Market yet? it's really near quito, and it's a lot less touristy than Banos - you should check it out, if you haven't already! Well, keep posting, and I'll let you know if I can come up and visit you - I'm considering it, if the offer's still good :)

[Gino]

Mister Anderson
As Chistine said, Ian its good to see you're having an amazing time. You're pictures and commentry are cool. I can't wait for our reunion soon! Take care on your journey!