18-21.06.: Baños
Saturday:
Accomodations at Hostal Valverde, which offers private bathrooms with modestly warm water (but little privacy, as the "room" is disconnected from the bedroom only by a wall not reaching to the ceiling) and a kitchen we can use. $8 the room after a little haggling: Doro had the bright idea of asking another pair of tourists what they just had paid, so we saved some dollars. They all have been invested in junk food of various sorts (and of course fresh fruit, but that is a lot less expensive) by now.
Baños has a lot to offer to tourists: we walked past clubs, bars and restaurants, and there are lots of tour agencies offering rafting, jungle tours, climbing, horse riding, puenting and more. We hiked some trails around the city, including one very scenic one at night, all of which were very nice, although none offered us good views of the local volcano. We had to contend with the signs throughout the city pointung us to safe spots in the case of an explosive eruption, and the cooled lave flows Doro pointed out to me in many parts of the canyon.
On Sunday, we rented a bike for $5 (well, two bikes, all right) to ride to Puyo, approx 80km mostly downhill to the east of Baños, but with some mean upwards gradients along the way. If you pay some attention, there is a sign poitning to a small unpaved road to the left, leading into the rainforest, which is beautiful. This is also where the torrential rains surprised us, and we spent half an hour sharing the questionable shelter of a newly built chicken coop with zero chicken, but millions of mosquitoes.
On the way back, our bus seats were overbooked, for the first time in SA. This was not a problem, as other seats were free, and as an added bonus, the girl sitting on our seat offered us sticks of sugar cane to chew on, which I can now recommend: it's yummy :)
A day trip on Monday to Puyo had us trekking through the rainforest at the nearby village of Fatima. We thought we were heading towards some caves and a waterfall, but it turns out the way we took was only a path to some out-of-the-way farms. This we found out after 90 minutes of hard hiking though rainforest on a muddy path made partly passable by rock or large logs set there. Very nice route, if you've brought watertight shoes and insect repellent. Short more comfortable than jeans.
Today, which I really hope is Tuesday (it is, I checked online. Stupid windows computers here are all configured not to let anyone change time and date -- I get that, but why the hell can't they just show the damn calendar?), we took a day off to chill a bit: we only hiked for 4 hours, after the rains mentioned in the previous post, up the Las Antennas and Ojos del Volcan, which we had tried to reach on our night trek mentioned above; this time, we had the endurance to finish the trail. Also: pizzas! And Ecuadorian malt beer, which tastes interestingly different from the kinds I know.
Well, that's it for today, finally caught up with our travels. Tomorrow we'll try an early start to get to Quito and immediatly onwards to Otavalo. Afterwards, it will be a long bus ride directly to Bogotá, and our flight to the Big Apple.
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