Advertisement
Baños is a great little town about 4 hours south of Quito. It’s known for its hot springs (hence the name) and its outdoor activities like rafting, rapelling, bridge jumping, buggy riding, and biking. It’s also usually jam-packed with tourists, but there is a volcano just on the outskirts of town called the Tungurahua, which erupted about a month before we arrived and was still erupting on and off so all the news reports scared off all the tourists… except us and a few others. Lucky us!!
We checked into a hostel called Plantas y Blanco. We got a dorm room for only $5.50/night. Have I already mentioned that Ecuador uses the US dollar? That is its official currency nowadays. Crazy, huh? Our French friends, Benoit and Amelie, showed up at the same hostel and were also in our same dorm room. We didn’t do much our first night there except grab some good Mexican food and play UNO on the rooftop terrace with the Frenchies.
Our second day in Baños the weather was cool and rainy so we didn’t do anything all day long. I felt really sick still, so I stayed in bed and read my book
most of the time. Ryan messed around on the internet. Then later that night we went to the hot springs. The ones right in town are really nice and VERY popular. Everyone in town was there, and this was a Wednesday night. There were two hot pools and two cold pools. One of the hot pools was rumored to be 114 degrees. I believe it because it was crazy hot. I could only stay in for a minute or two at a time. One of the cold pools was like a Jacuzzi full of ice water. The thing to do for full therapeutic effect was to spend 15 minutes in the very hot pool and then another 10 minutes or so in the freezing cold pool. Um, I lasted a few minutes in the hot one and a few seconds in the cold one and that was enough hopping back and forth for me. Ryan managed to stay in the icy pool for at least 5 minutes though… impressive.
That night we ate at a really good Italian restaurant. We got to hear the whole life story of the very nice man who was helping run the restaurant that
formerly belonged to his mother, who died 8 months ago. He was a pleasant man.
The next day we rented bikes and road the famous “road to Puyo”… well, we didn’t do the full 60 km to Puyo, but we went about halfway. Along the curvy, mountainous, but nearly all downhill road, you pass by 5 waterfalls. So along the way we stopped to check them out. Some we viewed from a distance and others we either hiked or took a tarabita (that gondola-type thing) over. The second to last waterfall is called El Pailon del Diablo, The Devil’s Cauldron, and it is by far the most impressive. You can hike right up to it, next to it, and behind it. It’s really breathtaking. It’s so massive that the ground kind of rumbles when you’re standing near it.
At the fifth and final waterfall, you have to hike down, down, down a billion flights of stairs to reach it. Then you can take a trail along a river. Along the river there are some extremely slippery rocks. Ryan was walking ahead of me and warned me to be careful, but I slipped anyway and fell right over, face-first,
and smacked my face on another rock. No permanent damage though. I won’t be coming home deformed or anything. Whew… We took a truck back to town because it was getting too late to ride back. On our way, we got to see the Tungurahua volcano erupting. It was just a bunch of ash and smoke, but it was cool anyway. That night we ate dinner at a really popular restaurant called Casa Hood. Ryan loved his Hindu curry so we went back again the next night. Really good food at this place. We also spent that night watching the final NBA game in a bar. Slightly disappointing that the Lakers won.
Our last full day in Baños we walked around town, did some souvenir shopping, and got 2-for-1 massages, which were actually pretty darn good. I would’ve paid good money for this full-body massage & reflexology in the States, but here it costs a mere $12.50 each. Nice.
The next day, we took off for the tiny towns in the Quilatoa loop.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.149s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 16; qc: 57; dbt: 0.0809s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb