Baños

We had a three-day-weekend, so I traveled to a town called Baños with Nora, three other Grinnell girls, Rebecca, Nora Skelly and Allie, as well as another girl on our program, Grace. The bus ride was about three and a half hours and was excruciating because Nora and I had to pee for almost the entire time. Vendors kept jumping on and trying to sell food and gum and one man tried to sell love poems and advice. The ticket-taker on the bus made me nervous by hanging out the door while we drove extremely fast along curvy mountain roads…but we managed to make it to Baños. The town was extremely touristy, but also very beautiful with opportunities to hike, bike and spend time outside. We managed to get a room in a great hostel with six beds and private bathroom very close to everything in town. The first day we took a hike that overlooked the city and an amazing graveyard.


Early on Saturday we went to the volcanic hot springs and got there before the tourist rush. There were three main pools at different temperatures and we had a great conversation with an Ecuadorian couple whose daughter is studying abroad in Italy. Later that day, Nora, Allie and I took an incredible 22 KM bike ride along a road following a river through the mountains. We had to ride through a pitch-black tunnel through a mountain and we honestly felt like we were going to die….but luckily the rest of the ride was much less scary. We passed fantastic waterfalls and eventually came to a trailhead where we parked the bikes and hiked to a suspension bridge and a massive waterfall. We put the bikes in the back of a truck and climbed in with three Australian travelers to head back to town. We found this great back-packer’s café in town, which had a book exchange, funky art, a fireplace and great food for reasonable prices. Sleeping in the hostel was like a huge sleepover and it was great taking a break from the big city.

On Sunday we bought / sampled some of the famous hand-pulled taffy before getting on a very crowded bus back to Quito. Nora and I got ripped off on the taxi from the terminal to our apartment building and paid more for a ten-minute ride than the ticket all the way to Baños. Anyway, it was wonderful to see my family in Quito again and I spend part of the evening helping Pedro sort international soccer cards while watching the Ecuadorian equivalent of Dancing with the Stars…