Killing Time in Baños

Oh my goodness, it´s March! Time is flying by...

Mike and I needed to find something to do for 6 days before reuniting with Leif for continued adventures. We had been thinking about camping for a night in Cotopaxi national park and then heading off someplace else, but further research suggested that this might be a rather expensive and logistically difficult option. Cotopaxi is not super easy to get to, and options for lodging near the park aren´t ideal. So we decided to head to Baños for 5 nights. We´re discovering that we greatly prefer to stay in one place for 4-5 days (even if it means running out of things to do), rather than having to constantly be dealing with buses. I do not enjoy traveling in buses for several reasons, the biggest of which might be having to remain dehydrated all day so as not to have to pee. Guys can ask the bus to stop and just hop off on the side of the road, but there´s rarely a convenient place for a lady to relieve herself on the side of the road. On the main roads there are few bushes and lots of traffic. I could go on quite a long rant about buses, but that´s not really the point here. Anyway...

Baños is about 3.5 hours south of Quito. A tiny town tucked in a valley, surrounded by gorgeous mountains. While we were still about an hour and half away, Mike and I looked out the window of the bus and happened to notice a huge mushroom cloud of smoke and ash billowing above a large peak in the distance.
"Is that a volcano?"
"Um...I think so...I´ve never seen a volcano."
"I´m pretty sure that´s a volcano erupting."
"Huh."
No one else seems to be interested in the erupting volcano, which suggested to us that this is old news. "Oh, yeah, that whole smoke and ash thing...bo-ring..." This is, of course, Volcán Tungurahua, the slopes of which Baños is nestled into. It is also what provides the hot thermal springs that feed the baths that the town is named for. We visited the main municipal baths on Saturday and they were nice but crowded with weekending Ecuadorians. A couple of Aussies staying at our hostal said that they tried to go even later in the afternoon and there was no possible way to even get in the water, the crowd was so big. Mike and I went back to the baths early this morning (Monday), where there were no crowds and the water was lovely (although the hot bath was almost unbearable).

Since we were going to be staying put for a while, we decided it would be beneficial to take a few Spanish lessons. We´ve been getting by alright, and I think we have a pretty good command of the present tense, but it´s always good to learn more, and here we definitely had the time. We found Mayra´s Spanish School, a couple blocks away from where we´re staying, and signed up for 4 two-hour classes. 8 hours of lessons doesn´t seem like a whole lot, but it´s been super helpful. We got to take lessons with Mayra herself, who is very nice, and she gave us lots of good materials to study. It´s really nice to practice speaking with someone who will correct you and explain why you were wrong. Otherwise, it´s hard to know if what we´re saying to people is actually correct, of if they´re just politely picking apart the meaning of our mangled phrases. We´ve had lessons in the afternoons from 2-4, which gives us plenty of times for morning activities.

On Friday we set out early for a hike into the mountains that surround the town. The trail began just a couple blocks down the road from our hostal and climbed steeply up to a lookout over the town, and further up past the small village of Runtun to a lookout with a direct view of Volcán Tungurahua. The clouds still hadn´t burned off by that time in the morning, but even though we couldn´t see the peak of the volcano (which still spews smoke and ash but hasn´t been on the verge of a major erruption for a few years) it was still a beautiful of the surrounding mountains and valley. We then headed straight down the steep ridge (Mike called this part of the trail a ¨foot luge¨) back toward town, passing the giant statue of a seated Virgin Mary that watches over the valley.

No classes for us on Sunday, so another early morning found us renting bikes for the day and heading east out of town toward Puyo. The road is referred to as the ¨Highway of the Waterfalls,¨and aptly so, because there are waterfalls around every corner. Going toward Puyo is mostly downhill, but the lack of pedaling was made up for by a significant amount of hiking. We stopped a few times to hike down into the valley for better views, then back up to the road. At one point we spend about an hour hiking to a waterfall that our almost completely useless map made look much closer than it was. We finally gave up in favor of moving on to another spot, but it was a nice hike nonetheless. The most touristed (by Ecuadorians) waterfall was El Pailón del Diablo, an impressively large waterfall that was viewable by footbridge after passing through a gauntlent of vendors and restaurants on the hike down. On our way to the waterfall a group of young Ecuadorians beckoned us to come take a picture with them.
¨¿Porque somos gringos?¨
¨¡Sí!¨
¨...No...¨
This is not the first time we´ve been solicited for photos because we´re gringos...it´s somewhat of an interesting phenomenon.

After stopping along the road for lunch we decided to head back to Baños for the afternoon, so we hailed a passing ranchero and enjoyed the ride back. In the morning we hadn´t seen many other cyclists, but we passed a lot of them on our way back. Hooray for getting an early start. The rest of the day was spent relaxing in town. People watching on the weekend has been interesting. Baños seemed fairly deserted after the madness of Carnaval, but the weekend brought throngs of people into town. Foreigners aren´t the only tourist here!

Today is our last day in Baños, and tomorrow we´ll head up to Latacunga to meet Leif. Then we´ll all spend a couple days exploring the Laguna Quilotoa loop. I foresee lots of hiking in our future, and we definitely need it to get in shape for the challenging Choquequirao hike that awaits us in Peru!