JJ's Travelogue

Four hours south of Quito lies the pretty mountain town of Baños. The town itself isn’t much to write home about, it’s fairly utilitarian, but it’s setting is stupendous. Nestled in a valley surrounded by mountain peaks with rivers running through that have eroded dramatic canyons, and to top it off an active volcano looming over everything. The town reminds me a bit of San Pedro, the town I lived in in Guatemala for six weeks whence I began this trip – touristy, but for good reason, and a real town underneath once you scratch the surface. Come to think of it, once you leave Quito, rural Ecuador looks a lot like Central America – beautiful scenery but fairly rough conditions for the people. Men spitting and pissing in the street and lots of unfinished concrete.

I can’t get over how many gringos there are here, including high school and college groups from the States. An amazing amount of hotels and restaurants for such a small town have sprung up to serve all these tourists – some nice, others terribly overpriced. It’s the kind of small town where kids run around playing unsupervised and shopkeepers take IOU’s if you don’t have small bills. It’s also safe – how nice not to have to constantly watch your back when walking around at night the way you have to in the big cities. Interestingly for such a small town, the shops and restaurants are all open quite late. And this doesn’t seem to be for the tourists – I saw the local people eating quite late. Perhaps when the economy is based on tourism they don’t need to get up as early as they do for agriculture, and their whole daily schedule shifts later.

Baños is an odd name for a town, since that’s the word used for “bathroom” in Spanish. The full name of the town is Baños de Agua Santa (“Baths of the Holy Waters”), which makes a bit more sense – the name refers to the natural hot springs that run off of neighboring Tungurahua volcano (5,023 m / 16,480 ft). Tungurahua (“throat of fire” in Quichua) is quite active – in 1999, all 20,000 residents were evacuated for months when the volcano started erupting. Imagine being given only a few hours to leave your house for who knows how long. The locals I talked to were pretty bitter about this (sleeping in shelters far away from home, crops and livestock lost, tourism plummeted) particularly since (according to them) nothing much happened. Ironically, or perhaps having learned their lesson, the next administration apparently did nothing when it actually did rain fire in 2006.

From the guidebook: “Since 1999, Tungurahua has been officially closed to climbers. There is nobody to stop you from entering the area, but the dangers of being hit by flying volcanic bombs are very real.” Naturally, I rented a motorcycle and headed straight for it. The bike had no lights, gauges, dials, or horn, but eventually we bonded after some harrowing sections of “road” covered in thick volcanic mud. A bit scary since I couldn’t tell how deep it was, but the rest of the journey was  fun in a rough dirt-bike kind of way. I made it as far as the road went, and after that it would have been a 2-3 hour hike to the summit. I chose not to do this, mostly because I was paying $10/hr for the bike.

Another day I rented a bicycle and rode a couple of dozen kilometers downhill passing several dramatic waterfalls, including one creatively named the Devil’s Cauldron. Adjoining many of the waterfalls are simple cable-cars that enterprising locals have set up to whisk people across the canyon. All you need is a simple basket and a length of wire rope attached to an old truck engine at either end! It started raining pretty hard (as it has for six out of the last seven days), and with the route being entirely uphill on the way back, I tried my hand at hitching a ride back to town with the bike. After a while a nice family in a pickup took pity on me, and the dad refused to take even one dime from me at the end of the ride. Wow, it’s moments like those that really make you remember a country.

White-water rafting is another popular activity here but with all the rain we’ve been having, the rivers are easily a Class IV – no, thank you. Besides, I’m a wimp – the last time I went rafting was in Norway, where despite wearing thermals and a wet suit, I froze my cute little butt off. Having already decided not to repeat that scene here, my friends at the hotel mention off-handedly that a French tourist died two weeks ago on one of the rafting trips. Umm, excuse me? While I love being back in a country that will rent me a motorcycle with no questions asked, stories like this do give me pause. A tourist drowning would cause an immediate cease to all trips and calls for higher safety standards in 1^st world countries. Here, life goes on.

Bungee jumping from bridges and canyoning (rappelling down waterfalls) are two other popular activities that I declined. Although to be fair, I was impressed with the rigging I saw at one of the bridges – they were doing everything right and with good gear.

The hot springs are public baths, large pools of varying temperatures. One of them is open at night, a lovely way to stave off the damp chilly evenings. The water is brown from the minerals, not from people! [They change the water in the pools every other day.] Normally I like the hottest water available, but one of these was scorching – I don’t know how the locals could sit in it for as long as they did. It was nice to alternate with the cold plunge pool, but boy did it tire me out – I fell into a deep sleep as soon as I got back to my room.

Several professional massage studios offer one-hour full-body massages for $20 in one of many different styles – Swedish, reflexology, Shiatsu, etc. Naturally I had to sample a few of them in order to compare and contrast. The sacrifices I make for you, dear reader, are boundless.

A couple of the women who work at my hotel befriended me and it was nice to spend time with such salt-of-the-earth locals, born and raised right there. Each of the women have a single daughter very close in age to each other, about 4 ½. Super cute girls, we got along fabulously. One evening we took a chiva tour that purported to show us the fiery magma of the volcano. The tour operator neglected to mention that 95% of the time the top of the volcano is completely covered in clouds preventing any kind of viewing like the dramatic photos in their brochures, and this particular night it was also raining pretty hard. Chivas are open-sided, we were so cold our teeth were chattering the entire ride. But they did offer us canelazo to warm our insides and presented a fire juggling show that people were pretty impressed with. It was a bit pasé for me, having worked with so many fire jugglers over the years!

Baños has an interesting animal prison zoo featuring a lot of the endangered species that used to be common around here – tapirs, jaguars, tons of weird birds. Across the street is a “serpentario” with tons of snakes that look like Jasmine, leading me to miss her like crazy.

The town is famous for it’s taffy – at any given time, dozens of shops are in process of making the stuff, which involves lassoing huge strands of the stuff around a hook on the wall over and over, which I guess is what builds up the chewyness of it. Sugarcane is also bought and sold in large quantities here. It’s delicious (and surprisingly juicy) to suck on raw.. it’s also fed into small machines for extracting the juice.

Leprechaun bar/disco is the “in” place for foreigners and hip locals, but the reason I kept coming back was for the huge bonfire in the back patio. A fully stocked bar getting American college girls liquored up just a few feet from a large roaring fire.. sounds like a recipe for disaster, but is actually quite fun. Usually I eschew such college-crowd scenes, but I’m trying to force myself to be more social. Sure enough, I met some interesting people – two French girls from Lyon, one of whom looked exactly like a girl I once met in Lyon, very odd… also a couple of engineering grad students from Texas who are living down here in the boonies working on an interesting project – portable medical packs. The backpack is powered off a laptop battery and contains centrifuges, microscopes, all the lab equipment a doctor would need to perform tests out in the field for people who live hours away from medical centers. It’s an impressive effort, and shocking that this type of thing hasn’t existed for years.

One particularly late night as I was walking home I improbably got roped into translating (!) between an upset American frat boy that had gotten some money stolen, a group of locals, and the Frenchies. Turns out it was a shady Colombian who stole his money, but he  thought the thief was associated with the friendly locals who were just hanging out on the corner. Luckily his trashy sorority girls pulled him away before he could start a brawl, which felt imminent. The locals then wanted my help in hitting up the French girls (which the girls were down for), but I excused myself to hit the hay.

Here is a video of some crazy dude bridge jumping:

And here is a video of throwing taffy: