Baños

I had seen so many pictures of other travelers on the swing of the "casa de arbol" in Baños that I knew I had to go to that swing. But I realized quickly that there is a lot more to do in Baños.
When I got to Baños I checked into a hostel which had good reviews and was supposed to have a social rooftop terrace with amazing views. It did have a rooftop but unfortunately the hostel wasn't social at all. I spend the first day walking around town checking out offers for horseback rides from different tour agencies. There were tons of agencies and they all had signs for horseback rides outside. But wherever I entered they tried to convince me to take another tour instead. Apparently horseback rides were not really popular and they couldn't guarantee me a tour.
Back at my hostel the rooftop was still deserted. At least there were a few people in my room. But they were a group of 4 traveling together and weren't really interested in making new friends.
As it was raining heavily I decided to have dinner in the restaurant connected to the hostel. It was an Arabic place with a fireplace in the center. You had to take your shoes of and sit on the floor. It was a nice and cozy atmosphere for a place cold and rainy like Baños. Hostel guests got a free Canelazo - a typical Ecuadorian hot drink with cinnamon and sugar cane alcohol. I had a nice dinner and spend some time writing my blogg.
The next morning I met Ryan in my room and he was complaining about the same thing I was: that it seemed just impossible to meet people in this hostel. We decided to go to another hostel together and ended up spending the next two days together.
As I couldn't convince him to do a horseback ride with me I let him convince me to rent bicycles instead. We did the complete ruta de las cascadas - a 19km long route along several warefalls and other attractions. Luckily the road goes downhill most of the way and you can take a pickup truck with your bike on the way back. It was raining on and of all day but never to bad so we kept on going. There were lots of ziplines crossing the river along the way but we only did a cable car which was crossing towards one of the waterfalls which was pretty cool.
Usually I'm not to impressed with waterfalls anymore. Most of them are kind of the same. But the Pailon del diabolo (devils cauldron) was massive! There were 2 tourist sites to get the best views of the waterfall. The first one didn't have the view from above but you could climb (and had to crawl) through the rocks on one side of the waterfall till you were almost behind the waterfall. We were soaking wet when we came out of this. As we didn't want to miss the view from above we ended up going to the other site as well. Here you would climb into the area from above and end up on a plattform really close to the waterfall where you had tons of water crashing down right next to you.
There was one more waterfall to visit after this and as the sun was finally out we decided to go there as it was the only one where you could go for a swim.
Ryan chickened out in the end but I at least had to get in the water for a quick dip.
As soon as we came back up to the street it started raining really heavy. So we were happy to find a guy with a truck who drove us straight back to the place where we got our bikes.
Our new hostel was a lot nicer and had a bar and restaurant to meet other people. After a hot shower and a pizza at a nice but simple place someone had recommended to Ryan I chilled here for a while before going to bed.
The next morning we got up super early to get to the thermal bath before it got really crowded. Turned out it's already pretty crowded with locals at 6:30am. The bath was nothing fancy but I liked the hot water pools a lot. They are all outdoor located right next to another waterfall. The main pool was pretty warm but there was one pool that was extremely hot. I almost felt like I was gonna faint. But to shower of with ice cold water from the waterfall helped.
As the sky cleared up nicely that day we decided to finally head up to casa de arbol for the swing. Up there I learned the history behind the treehouse from another girl (even though I dont have proof that this is right). Apparently the treehouse was build to observe Mt. Tungurahua, the nearby active volcano. One day the seismologist got bored one day and added the swing to the treehouse for diversion.
Today there are actually 4 swings. 2 are attached to the treehouse (one on each site) and 2 more are just setup like a over dimensional swingset next to it along the chasm. It turned out most people go there mostly for the purpose of taking a picture on the swing. They would get of as soon as there someone had taken the perfect picture. I actually enjoyed the swing itself a lot. The feeling of flying over the edge of the mountain was incredible! I went on all 4 swings. The ones by the treehouse were watched by guards who also pushed you and made the swing turn for more fun.
Ryan took his job as my photographer really serious so even though this wasn't the main purpose I'm happy to have tons of pictures of me flying away now.
I was going to leave that night to Canoa. As usual they told me to get there one hour ahead of time to secure my seat on the bus. But after I had spend long hours in bus terminals because I got there early I decided to be a little less german. I had dinner with Ryan at the nearby pizza place from the night before and just walked over to the bus terminal about 9:30pm for my 10pm bus. Turned out the bus was fully booked by now 😬 Luckily there was another bus leaving an hour later which should still get me to Guayaquil in time for my connection to Canoa. But now I again had to spend more than an hour at the bus terminal waiting for my bus...Read more