Who needs a bath?

---

Baños - 7th to 10th of Jan.

We got the bus to Baños during the day and the views were pretty spectacular. Saw Cotapaxi and the active volcano near Baños as well. That was so weird to see, the volcano spewing smoke. Amazing.

Two Ecuador people sat next to me throughout the trip. One was an indigenous woman, wearing the typical hat, shawl and the likes. The other was a girl the same age as me and I attempted a very bad conversation with her. She had her little boy with her so I got the phrase book out and attempted to ask her questions and tried to understand what she was saying to me. Over the first week in Ecuador all Richard and I kept saying was that we needed to learn Spanish. One thing we have discovered in that the locals love to speak to me but aren't as fond of Richard!

Our hostel in Baños, La Chimenea, had been recommended by the Ozzies in the hostel in Quito. It was a much quieter hostel than the one in Quito but it was lovely. More like a hotel than a hostel and was only $7 a night for our own room with en suite. The hostel had a pool, though it wasn't filled, and a rooftop cafe that had great views of the town, the waterfall and the mountains.

We did some horse trekking in Baños which turned into the scariest experience of my life. Honestly, we had no riding hats on and the woman who took us on the trek made us go down a sheer mountain. She sent Richard down this stream type thing and I was just like "No, no, no, I'm not going down there". Her response was "Si, si, si". I didn´t know what to do, we were on a very windy road half way up a mountain that only had room for one row of traffic so my options weren't great. Anyway, I lead the horse down a slightly less wet way and then she made Richard and I get back up on the horses and I thought I was going to die! I can't even describe how invisible the path we were meant to be going on was and how steep the trek was! I kept thinking the horses would topple over. On reflexion, I'm glad we did it because the trek was really picturesque, with great views of the mountains and the nicest waterfall I've ever seen, but I wouldn't be in such a hurry to do it again!

We also went to the baths in Baños which is what the town is famous for. Went to the hot ones on both the Friday evening and Saturday afternoon we were there and bathed in the funny green water! Baños was great, we wanted to stay longer really especially because the weather wasn't great so we didn't get to do the 60km cycle to Puyo that we wanted to do. Or Richard wanted to do at least.

But we had to get to Montanita for our Spanish lessons, so we took our first night bus of the trip. I'm glad it was dark because it didn't feel so safe and I can imagine it didn't look so great either! Ha! Got the night bus to Guayaquil where we needed to change buses. We tried to speak to someone at the booth selling tickets to Montanita but we hadn't a clue what they were saying so came away without tickets. This was about 4am and needless to say, Richard and I were both pretty grumpy and frustrated. Thankfully, I saw two guys who had been on the earlier bus with us and one of them spoke English. They were going to Montanita too so they told us what to do and we ended up on a bus to Santa Elena (though it was a different one to the one our new friends were on) and changed buses there for Montanita.

---

Comments

[Dee]

Beautiful
That trek with horses sounds fun and dangerous, dangeroulsy fun if you will. And well worth it cos those waterfalls look amazing. Also in the pictures Richard is wearing a blue top that appears to have become increasing popular with boys of the messy hair variety. That is all. xxx