Baños was the perfect town to end my trip in. It´s this little town 3 hours from Quito, 1 hour from the Amazon, surrounded by volcanoes, lush greenery and a ton of action sports.
My first day here I went to the travel agency to find out about the different activities I could do, assuming at 3:30 pm it was too late to do anything my first day. Not the case. They said, ¨you can do the bridge jump right now if you want¨, to which I said ¨sure!¨, not even knowing what the lady was talking about. This crazy, drunken Ecuadorian guide pulls up in a 4x4 and tells me to get in. We drive to the San Francisco bridge, which is the tallest bridge you can jump off of in Baños. This dude is swerving all over the road and I´m convinced he´s going to forget to connect my harness and I´m going to tumble to my death. Yet still I continue because, well, I´ve had enough trouble in Ecuador so may as well see if my luck is changing!
He puts me in the harness, tells me to stand on the platform, which has two footprints with half the foot only because the other half dangles over the edge. He tells me onthe count of 3 to put my arms out like Superman and jump. Of course I protest, because unlike the times I´ve bungee jumped in Mexico, I saw where I was going to land, and from this place all I saw was rocks and water below. He promised I would swinglike a pendulum and there was a man at the bottom that would bring me back in. My legs were shaking like crazy and I don´t know how it happened, but when he counted to 3 something made my legs move and off I went. It was a crazy rush and I loved all 3 seconds of it! The town is filled with thermal springs and spas offering every massage under the sun for $20, more than Peru´s $6 running cost but still way less than NYC! I got a massage my first day, which helped me relax after my hellish days in Quito.
The second day here I went canyoning in the morning. Canyoning is kind of like rock climbing in a waterfall. But by climbing, I mean slipping, because the rocks are wet and you can´t actually grip them, so you slip and slide your way down while the guide (the same drunk guy Alex) pulls you down. At the bottom you have to jump backwards into ice water, which was just lovely. There are 4 waterfalls in all, and one of them you have to slide down, which was somehow more scary than being pulled down by the harness. When I got back from the canyoning I set off for a 3 hour hike. There is so much to do here I couldn´t sit still at all. I somehow ended up back at the massage place. Hope I don´t make a daily habit of this! I met 2 really nice girls from the US at dinner that night, and made plans to take a 80km bike ride to the jungle town, Puyo, with one of them the next day.
So on day 3 I set off on one of the most beautiful rides I´ve ever been on. Everything was in the jungle so giant green plants, beautiful flowers and countless cascadas (waterfalls). One was called something like the Devil´s Mouth, and the waterfall was so powerful that as it hit the water the roar it made was deafening. We got soaked at that one too because it all splashed up onto the viewing platform. We stopped at km 66 for lunch because we both were about to faint. It was this little shack on the side of the road that said ´trucha´, which means trout, and we assumed they had food so that was where we went. We asked for our choices, and they told us ´trout or tilapia´. So we got one of each, but really what they served us was plate after plate of all sorts of different things - salad, plantains, rice- so much food that I was glad when it started raining and I didn´t have to get back onto my bike! The 2 daughters of the man who owned the fish shack were so cute, they were 7 & 16 and they helped us flag down a bus from the side of the road to throw our bikes on to return to town. Such a fun day, and good training since I´m doing a Century ride in NJ in the end of September!
Day 4 started off with a ´steam health bath´. I didn´t know what it was, but they offered it for $3.50 in my hostel. So at 7:30 in the morning I went into the spa and they made me sit in this little wodden box in my bathing suit, filled with steam, for 5 minutes at a time. After 5 minutes just when I felt like I was going to faint, I had to get out and towel myself off with ice water. This was repeated 4 more times, and after the last time I got sprayed down with ice cold water. It is supposed to be detoxing, so why not. I felt good after, grabbed breakfast and then set off for white water rafting. I´ve been rafting a few times before, and I´ve enjoyed it almost every time (favorite was the time in New Paltz when we drank our way down the rapids, least favorite was with my parents when it was less than Level 1 and I napped the whole time because it was SO boring!) This one was crazy. The rapids were amazing. The group I was with was all from a non-profit agency from the states that work setting up volunteers to work in indigenous communities in Latin America, and a guy from Canada who thought I was his neighbor due to the Lulu gear (I still love getting recognized for my Lulu!) I was laughing the whole way down the rapids, had the time of my life, and found out about a ton more things to do while I´m here.
When I got back, I went to the hot springs with 2 new friends from my hostel, Sam from Aus and Jose from Portgual. Two guys sharing a room with me in my all-female dorm. That´s South America for you, you never get what´s advertised! The town Baños is named after the natural thermal baths all around the town, the ones we went to were filled with locals and the water was so murky that although it was natural, I probably acquired 15 different diseases from sitting in it. After the springs we went to dinner at an Italian restaurant, and while we were sitting there, there was a big commotion across the street. A drunk man (un barracho) decided he didn´t like his meal at the Swiss fondue place (what a local was doing at the fondue place is beyond me since I only see them at the small local joints with no menus, or picking up the street food), and he decided he didn´t want to pay and also wanted to pick a fight with the waiter. That made for an amusing experience, as people kept coming to drag him away and 5 minutes later he was back screaming outside the restaurant again. So apparently the rule in Ecuador is if you don´t like your food you don´t pay, and if you like my bag you steal it.
Day 6, I really started to feel settled in here. I haven´t spent more than 5 days straight anywhere, which never really gives you enough time to get settled in and learn enough about your surroundings. But this town is really small, and easy to learn, and since I´ll be here another week I´m really trying to adjust and know it in and out before heading back to NY. I started my spanish lessons this morning, which I can already tell I´m going to love. My teacher, Yvonne, picked me up at the hostel and said for the first 30 minutes we would walk around having a conversation in spanish so she could evaluate how much I knew and where to begin. She said that my vocabulary was pretty good, but I can only speak in present tense and have no idea how to conjugate, which I even remember from HS I always had trouble with. I decided on a week long course with 4 hours a day, and in only one day I felt like I learned a ton. It´s a different method from Rosetta Stone, which I still swear by, but this is different because it´s one-on-one, I can ask questions when I´m confused, and learn things that are applicable to the situation rather than just what Rosetta thinks I might need to know. For example, we had a conversation about government and elections, and the corruption in the San Pedro prison in Bolivia. A much more detailed and interesting conversation than I´ve been accustomed to having due to my limited vocabulary. I´ll have homework to do each night (except tomorrow when I got to the jungle), and it will definitely keep me busy my last week. The more I´m here the more I wish I was going to Colombia to practice my spanish and finish the trip, but I still don´t regret my decision to come home because I´m still convinced something bad would have happened if I´d stayed. Yvonne showed me the secret for lunch (almorzar), which is to buy maiz (corn) from the stands, which they cover in tomatoes, onion, and aji sauce. For 50 cents, you have a delicious, quasi-nutricious lunch. I also learned that when you go in to get any kind of spa procedure, they charge you less if you don´t ask how much beforehand. If you ask how much they know you´re a tourist and they double the price. But I went for a pedicure and just sat down and didn´t say a word, and in the end they charged me $5 - half the price I was quoted when I asked yesterday. So I´m definitely learning the ropes here, and am so excited to continue my lessons next week!
The jungle unfortunately wasn´t much to write about. We went to a monkey park at the beginning of the day, which was great because there were monkeys crawling all over us, but after that the rest of the day was spent hiking in mud and taking the worl´d worst canoe ride. They put me on a Spanish tour, so I only understood fragments of what he was telling us. Luckily my friend Jose was there to translate, but not enough for me to actually understand half of what the guide was saying.
My friends Sarah & James came on Sunday, and I´m so happy to be spending my last week with them. Every day I have spanish lessons from 9-12, and then we get lunch and explore Baños. We went on a hike one day, found a hookah bar, and are having a farewell party on Friday with Sarah´s homemade Caprihanas that she learned how to make in Brazil. Since it´s raining the whole week, we decided to spend our afternoons pampering ourselves at the spa. They have all sorts of weird detox and mud treatments we´re going to experiment with because, for $7, why not!!
Saturday afternoon I´ll head back to Quito, where I will not leave my hostel until 4:00 Sunday morning when I go straight in a cab to the airport and start my journey home. The best part is that Todd graciously offered to throw me a welcome back party, which I´m really looking forward to. I can´t believe it´s been 4 months since I´ve seen my friends (minus Caryn & Mike, Melissa, & Marlene & Alex). Almost home!
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