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Published: November 16th 2007
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Cuenca
The architecture (Caelin sorry about spelling) was beautiful in this town but besides spanish lessons there wasnt mcuh to do ... The simple bear necessities of life!! Although we are currently living it up in Cuenca, staying a really nice hostel called El Cafecito we did just come from two small towns in the Oriente, living with very little and practicing Balo´s bear necessities. We arrived in Cuenca last night and had pre booked our stay at El Montestario Hostel. When we arrived we realized the rooms were distributed over a six story, empty, dark and scary office building. After being in the hostel for about a minute we felt the after shock of the Chilie earth quake and decided it was time to move on. We are now in a much nicer, friendly hostel and are booked to take four days of crash spanish lessons so that when the greasy latins hit on us we will have snappy comments to throw back at them! Cuenca is a nice town, a little big for our liking, but the architecture is beautiful.
Before Cuenca we spent a few days in Banos, the Banff town of Ecuador located right beside Volcano Tungarhau. Banos was a really cute, brilliant little town in the middle of the mountains that had nice little tourist shops,
Fruit Loops
Tucan sam ligit almost flew right into us, it was scary but we were really close an abundance of restuarants and many bars. The first night we were in Banos we decided to take a night party bus up to a look out point to try and see the volcano at night, unfortunatly it was cloudy and we saw nothing but returned to town and had a great time chatting with locals and aussies at a local bar. The next morning we woke up and decided to hoof it up a mountain on our own to get a good view of the volcano instead of paying 50$ for a tour guide. The trails were really well marked and at the end of the day it was the best move ever because if we had paid for a guide we never would have met Carlos Sanchez.
About half way through our hike a short little man from Banos popped out a field beside the trail wearing a green hard hat and carring a radio. Carlos immediatly started talking away to us in Spanish ... of which we understand quite a bit. Carlos was the president of a volcano organization and worked at the top of the hill measuring volcano activity, he was on his way to
Parade
447 years makes for a beautiful parade work and out of the kindness of his heart decided to walk and talk to us all the way up to our look out point. He talked about everything from Americans drinking too much milk, to green houses, pesticides and fruits, to his family and 200 lbs wife. He also explained everything to us, the views of town, the usefulness of different plants along the way, the trails, the animals as well as very sneakily stealing us blackberries and lemons from peoples garden along the way. When we arrived at our look out point he went on to tell us that the view was no good and we needed to continue up the mountain with him, so thinking our free tour guide was overly kind hearted we continuted. After trekking up an animal trail to a little house, a tree fort, cows and weather equitment Carlos told us to sit down relax and watch the volcano. Tungarhau was pretty amazing, spewing out billows of smoke constantly and we had a clear day to watch it, all the while Carlos feeding us fresh cows milk - literally he milked the cow in front of us - pop corn, homemade lemon grass
Jungle
Into the jungle and into the waterfalls ... our cloths didnt dry for days but worth it tea and horrible tasting moonshine to be chased with hot tea (not a good idea on the best of days.) After spending the afternoon with Carlos we decided it was time to head back to town, so we said goodbye and went on our way. About five minutes later Carlos comes running down the hill saying he has a meeting to get too, so he will lead us back to Banos, again stealing us fruit in his sly little way. He was by far one of the nicest people I have ever met with the biggest heart so if you are ever in Banos, hike up to the look out point and say hello to Carlos!!!
Tena was our destination prior to Banos. We arrived in Tena on the perfect day, as it was the small towns 447 anniversary. Our night in town included a two hour parade of little kids, teenagers, adults and seniors preforming traditional dances, and some not so traditional in the case of the naughty school girls and scary nylon headed boys groups along with beautiful floats and an ambience in the town that was just all fun! After the parade there was a large
stage set up for a concert. Unlike North American concerts we were content to stand at the back of the crowd, as us being heads taller then everyone still allowed us to view the stage perfectly. The next day we were getting up early to head into the Jungle so we called it a night, also the fact that the whole town was out made us feel like we were getting a bundle more stares then usual.
Our jungle adventure began with us driving about an hour in the back of a pickup truck to a remote destination where we met the rest of our group (also from Canada) Sand and Cam and our guide Pedro. Our first jungle adventure was a trek up a mountain and through several waterfalls. We had to climb the waterfalls and it was really beautiful, all the while Pedro and his tag along little cousin Elwin talking away to us in only Spanish. The hike was like nothing I´d ever down before, climbing up waterfalls and swimming in their canyons below. On the hike down Elwin kept us entertained by running about 20 meters down from us, hiding in the forest and then
Carlos Sanchez
Milking a cow at a volcano look out center, what a perfect day jumping out and trying to scare us, he was one of the happist kids ever. After lunch we were going to go tubing, so the five of us carried four tubes up river for about an hour, dropped off our tubes and then continued to walk for a while to a lagoon for a swim. Not so much a lagoon from the little mermaid and kiss the girl, more like a dirty pool of river water where we played ball tag for an hour before commencing on the most hilarous river tubing adventure ever.
In Canada, tubing is a relaxing ride on an inner tube, down the river with rapids every now and then and your friend on the tube beside you ... not so in Ecuador. In total there were seven of us, our two guides .. Pedro and his buddy who together reminded us of Thomson and Thomson from Tin Tin and then the five Canadains. We only had four tubes, so Thomson and Thomson tied the four tubes together and we all climbed on, lets keep in mind our new Canadian buddies can´t swim. We began our journey down the Rio Napo, which actually has some
Volcan
Our view of the volcano erupting from Carlos' weather station pretty big rapids and because there are so many of us on few tubes the rocks hit a lot harder. The whole while our guides were pushing eachother off, splashing up a storm and keeping us entertained along with the whole situation we laughed the whole way down the river.
We then drove for an hour to another jungle site, where we met our new guide, Darwin whom also had not a word of english. We spent the next two days hiking through the selva learning about trees, plants, many brilliantly colored spiders, a few snakes and canyoning up through bat caves leading to many hands in guano. The jungle was beautiful but the bug bites made it overly itchy and us overly unattractive ... putting a question mark beside the boat trip to Iquitos once we reach Peru but we´ve heard only good things.
With the parade, Carlos and only great times we seem to be lucking out and hope to carry that with us to Montinita, the surf town that is our wednesday destination. Maybe come summer I´ll be brave enough to face the waves of the West Coast
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