Mí Primer Vez en el Banos

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I love Baños so very much. This is the first part of the reason why.



I arrived at the bus terminal with my two English friends, Lindsay and Julie. We had been on the road for some hours to Ambato where just had jumped off on instruction from the driver and crossed the road where like clockwork, a couple of minutes later another bus pulled up, taking us to Baños in the late evening. I had a hostel in mind for our time, but due to a lack of energy, when we were approached at the terminal by a tout, we checked out and checked into his hostel which was one of the typically non-guide book unpretentious places that granted us private room, bathroom and television to the delightful tune of $5 each. A good start.



Our first morning in Baños we ate breakfast whilst making a decision about how to spend our day; we decided upon hiking to try to get a view of the volcano Tungurahua which looms over the city at 5016m. The volcano is regarded as highly active, with it's last eruption only December 2010 which led to a 2km high ash cloud and an evacuation. We walked first to the tourist information office in the centre of the city and received some fantastic free maps of the city, its surrounding trails and the popular route from Baños to Puyo.



The route we chose to take us out of the city instantly introduced us to the incredible beauty that Baños is blessed with, though in retrospect, everywhere you walk in or around Baños shows off it's exquisite nature. The town sits in a deep valley surrounded by the greenest land I've seen outside of the UK. Baños is the Spanish word for bathroom and the city the named so because of the hot springs that is gifted with, courtesy of the volcano. Much if not all of the water from these springs has been diverted into various hot pools around the city and from our vantage point on their stairs we could see a few of these pools underneath a waterfall that rolls down the sharp incline that the North part of the city is built under. The setting of the city is one of the most beautiful I have seen anywhere in the world.



Anyway, we left town via a tremendous staircase and after much sweat and tears we arrived at the Virgin Mary statue, which offers a great view of the city. With something of a tired reluctance we began to ascend further up the mountain on a crude dirt trail, passing through gaps between bushes and trees. Though were all very tired, I love this kind of trail (I hate stairs) and so I went on ahead and reached the top long before the girls. Once we were all at the top of the trail we turned left, ignoring a different path that went further up the mountain and was labelled with words that we didn't really understand and for a distance that didn't know nor want to risk. So we took the left route to the village of Runtun, stopping for lunch in a restaurant which alleges a fantastic view of the volcano, unfortunately though, we saw only white fluffy clouds and the day became my first of many failed attempt to see the volcano.



On the bright side, our food was excellent and accompanied with a delicious babaco juice. Whilst we ate we were entertained by two rabbits that lived in the vicinity, a cute photo opportunity and an animal I don't remember seeing in South America until this point.



After lunch we began the long walk back down the mountain, passing a jacuzzi on an edge overlooking the city - I couldn't help but wonder what it must be like to be a travel with money and be able to afford to stay in such places!



The following day we rented bicycles and left Baños on a regularly taken trip towards Puyo which sits at 61km away. After leaving Baños we began to make good progress, quickly crossing a bridge which gave us a tiny glimpse of what we hoped might be the volcano; we saw snow, unfortunately the small section we could see was covered again clouds before we knew it.



This particular cycling trip from Baños towards Puyo is hugely popular because as along with the regular beauty of the whole of Baños, the route is lined with fantastic waterfalls. After a our brief view of was possibly the volcano we found ourself cycling past an impressive hydroelectric dam where we stopped to take photos, following which we reached the first of the seemingly endless number of waterfalls in the are. Up first was Manto de la Novia, a pair of stunning waterfalls, one of which appears to shoot out of a narrow chasm. The road follows the Río Pastaza and is built in an extreme area and as such there are plenty of tunnels along the way, the first of which we had to cycle through, but all others after granted some good off-road tracks instead, some of which pass underneath overhanging waterfalls. The experience is simply incredible.



We stopped in Río Verde for a drink and admired a topless mermaid statue of which my Grandma posted a comical facebook comment. On the way onwards we visited some beautiful landscaped gardens, taking plenty more photos and viewed another impressive waterfall.



The big stop of the cycling trip lies 18km from Baños and is appropriately heavily named Pailón del Diablo, or the Devil's Cauldron. Being tired from the previous days walking and the mornings cycling, the fact that we seemed to walk for a long time from our bikes was a pain in the ass. Fortunately though, Diablo is hugely impressive and is worthy of its accolade of being regarded as such.



Diablo is perhaps 80m high with a heavy flow and we enjoyed walking down a series of steps for photos whilst being hit by the soothing vapour, but the best part was to come. A low and narrow semi-cave leads up around the outside of the walls and climbing up through a hole in the rock leads to a high up view point where you can walk behind the water which we all did incredibly rapidly, still managing to get completely soaked.



We had lunch at the main entrance to the falls, after which realised that time seemed to have accelerated without us noticing and we were now into the afternoon and making it to Puyo was becoming less likely. We thought about this, but decided to carry on anyway to see how far we could go.



We had just completed another great off road section when the skies opened and we began to race towards a restaurant for shelter. As we left the road Lindsay's bike stopped moving, something had gone wrong and I jumped off and dragged it under a shelter over the restaurants balcony.



I have a pretty decent knowledge of bikes and checked all of them over before we rented them, but a problem I couldn't have imagined had hit Lindsay's bike, her de-railer had mysteriously bent into the spokes, preventing the rear wheel from turning and rendering the bike useless. I tried with frustration to bend the thick piece of metal back but it was hopeless. The mechanism was finished and our day and ride was over.



We waited under our shelter for the rain to stop. I drank a beer to pass the time, but the girls came up with a better idea and the three of us began gunning and pulling faces for Lindsay's camera. Things like this is just one of the reasons why I loved travelling with the two girls, little was taken seriously and everything was fun. It was a good time.



When the rain broke we decided we should see one last waterfall and so left the restaurant via a massive metal staircase to Machay. At this point the day was coming to a close and as we were in a deep valley, light was fading fast and it was becoming increasingly cold. For a reason I cannot explain I decided to walk as close to the base of this huge waterfall as I could. I think I got close, but my vision left me as the wind whipped and slashed my face violently with fresh cold water. For another reason that I cannot explain, it was a good moment to end the trip before we clambered back up the flimsy staircase and threw our bikes into a pick-up truck and headed back to town.



The next day we wanted to do something considerably lighter than the past two days and so we settled on a trip to the local zoo. There is a popular argument amongst idealists and those who have not really thought about the subject, that zoos are universally terrible and shouldn't exist. Obviously I don't agree and I believe I wrote the general arguments on both sides when I wrote about the zoo in La Paz so I won't bother doing so again now. What I will say though is that are often a reasonable estimation to visualise a countries economical position. The poorest countries I have travelled unsurprisingly have the worst (Nepal,, Indonesia) and the richest the most impressive (UK, Australia). Baños' wasn't too bad; most of the animals had a reasonable sized cage and it was fun watching the spider monkeys float around by their tales and to see the tremendous Galapagos turtles for the first time. I was also happy to see my favourite species of animal for the first time in South America, the tapir. I though it was cool that much in the same fashion as the pot-bellied pigs of London Zoo, the tapir had the option to freely roam about the zoo.



We were still feeling a bit lazy in the afternoon, but wanted to do something fun before we caught our bus in the evening. Fortunately there are plenty of options for this situation in Baños and we chose to rent a mini quad-bike each and headed out of town on them. We turned off the Puyo road up a side road and up the side of the mountain on the opposite side to where we had walked previously. Both girls were a little worried about taking the bikes, there had been a number of stories in the British media over the years of accidents, but as with everything, the girls quickly became confident and began to love their bikes as much as me. We raced up the side of the mountain in hope of that elusive view of the volcano to no avail, but instead we were granted another great view of the town and a glorious mountainous countryside view in the opposite direction. Baños really is one of the most beautiful places I have visited and much like Coroico in Bolivia, I understand why so many foreigners immigrate there.



As with our time in Cuenca, our time in Baños was too brief, but we left fresh after a fantastic few days on a night bus to Puerto Lopez in search of sun, sand and a trip to the 'poor man' Galapagos Islands, Isla del Plata.



Baños was a place that I didn't want to leave when I did; I took hopes that one day I may return and unusually when I have these feelings, I did. That is another chapter that will come later though; for now it's enough for me to simply say that I love Baños.

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