Baños and Quilotoa

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Next stop was Baños, kind of the main tourist centre in the south of Ecuador. It's sat in the middle of a ridiculously fertile valley with multiple rivers and waterfalls visible from the hostel i was staying in and a buttload of tourist agencies offering the usual tours, bike rentals, etc.




After spending the first afternoon chilling in the multiple thermal baths around town (less relaxing than it sounds because it's holiday season here and there were ABUNDANT screaming children... still fun though), i set off to cycle the 60km road leading from Baños down to Puno. It's known as the Ruta de las Cascadas for the multiple large waterfalls that you pass on the way down. I paid something like five USD to rent a bike (and as soon as i got out of town one of the pedals broke off and then the gears and one of the brakes stopped working) and what appeared to be a WW2-era soldier's helmet and set off with yet another sketchily hand-drawn Ecuadorian map.





The ride was fairly leisurely, though made slightly less leisurely for my lack of gears, and i reached the first waterfall after about ten minutes or so. For the waterfalls that are on the opposite side of the valley to the road, keen ecuadorian businessmen have built particularly unsafe-looking cable cars that take you out over the waterfalls and back powered by what appears to be a converted car engine. On each of the thee cable cars i took, at least one of the holiday-ing Ecuadorian families asked for a photo with their daughter/wife/mother. In one case it was all of the above, and so i asked something like "you guys really like photos with gringos, no?". One of the daughters told me that it was not because i was a gringo, but because i'm really handsome... I'm definitely going to assume she was being sincere.





Not much further down the road from the first waterfall, i discovered that the large numbers of pretty bridges high over rivers around Banos had given rise to a pretty spectacular sport. It's called puenting, and is kind of similar to bungee in that you jump off a bridge tied to a rope, except that this rope is not elasticated, and it loops under the bridge and attaches to the other side. When you jump off (just off the railing of the bridge... no fancy platforms here), the rope tightens smoothly and you get flung upside-down underneath the bridge and out the other side. MASSIVE fun. The guy who appeared to be helping people steady themselves before jumping was actually there to shove nervous people over the edge because if you don't jump properly the rope can get tangled. Hilarious. After visiting a few more waterfalls, including one particularly spectaular one that has a really narrow natural tunnel that you can squeeze through to end up behind the waterfall, it started to rain and i decided to throw the bike on top of a passing bus and hitch a ride back to Banos for a hot shower.





The following morning i read that you could go puenting off San Francisco bridge (about three times higher than the one i jumped off the day before), and i eagerly jumped on a bus to ride for a hour to the town of San Francisco, which has a clearly marked bridge called San Francisco bridge right adjacent. Long story short, it was the wrong bridge... the real one was all of one hundred meters from the bus terminal. Gosh i'm intelligent. By the time i got back, they'd closed up shop and it was time for me to head on northward.





Next stop was an amazingly nice hostel in a remote village a little further north of banos called Chugchilan. The only way to get there was by four hours of bus ride over corrugated dirt roads that are cut into the sides of mountains. Despite being a little bit frightening due to the temperament of Ecuadorian bus drivers (either hard on the accelerator or all the way on the brake), the views were amazing, and there are a heap of farms built onto precarious slopes that i'm certain more than one cow has rolled down and plummeted off. At dinner in the hostel, i met an american couple (one medical student and one aspiring medical student) who i set off the next day with to visit Laguna Quilotoa, a gigantic volcanic lake not far from Chugchilan. We bought some local bread and a slab of delicious frash cheese and hopped onto the back of a flatbed truck for the one hour ride to the lake. The six hours hike aroud the lake rim was spectacular (the water is bright blue because of some mineral, and the countryside equally pretty), and we arrived back just in time to miss a crazy downpour. One huge, delicious dinner later, it was time to head to Colombia.

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Photos

Ruta de las cascadas
Off to go fight some Germans

Comments

[alle]

what was for (huge delicious) dinner??