Hola!

After hitching a short ride from Ambato to Baños with a supernice ecuadorian family, we found ourselves a nice hostal for $5 a night midday tuesday. Hostal Rosalita is highly recommended, big nice rooms and friendly staff. Baños is a touristy town in a deep valley very close to the active volcano Tungurahua, who had a small eruption as late as december. It´s a beautiful place with steep mountains all around. See photos!

Our first day in Baños was very calm, we didn´t really do anything. Uploaded pictures and got some information about what to do in Baños. This turned out to be quite a lot: Rafting, swingjumping, moutaineering, mountainbiking, canyoning, canopying, paragliding, you name it. Our budget obviously don´t allow us do to all this stuff so we had to choose activities according to this.

We decided that we wanted to rent bicycles and ride them down the valley, visiting waterfalls and other stuff on the way. Started of early morning wednesday and soon encountered a sign saying waterfall -> 3kms. Well, why not? 2 minutes later we found ourselves going upwards steep valleyside and we slowly realized we had to do 3kms of this hill. 30-40 minutes later we arived, legs full of acid after the 17% ascent. There we found beautful cascades and a canopy, or also called zip-line. We did the zip-line that had an height of 120 meters and a length of alltogether 1km. Fun times! We got some fresh trout lunch before we descended the steep hill passing cars on the way. Thrilling. We rode down the valley some 50km, very easy being downhill the whole way, seing waterfalls and beautiful nature the whole way. When we got close to the rainforest it started raining (who would guess?) so we took a bus back to Baños exhausted after a long day on a seat!

Next day Eirik went to rafting and a moneysaving Ludvig hiked up close to the Tungurahua volcan. Both had a very fun and interesting day and when we met again in the afternoon we went to a zoo. Without many expectations we entered and went through it seeing birds, spiders and frogs. Not very impressed we discovered that the actual zoo was somewhere else, and upon entering this one we realized that this was the place. Jaguar, monkeys, ocelot, bears, more monkeys, tapir, a flying Condor(!), more monkeys, birds etc. Cool thing seeing all these animals from the ecuadorian nature, but they´d of course be better off outside of the cages. Went out at night to grab some beers with some germans Eirik had met at rafting, with the hope of leaving for the jungle and Puyo the next day.

Saturday we woke up with an hangover. Chilled the whole day, writing postcards and letters home and posted it all at the post office in town. $66 for 4 kgs, and aledgedly it´ll take 8 days but we figure it will take more like 2 months. It was already dark before we could think about leaving Baños, so we took an extra night at Rosalita. Happy from finding out that our money from the flight ticket to Lima had been returned to us, we ate a good dinner at an italian restaurant, spending the crazy amount of $11 each. This ticket I´m mentioning we bought 3 months ago, before travelling to Ecuador, because we were travelling on one-way tickets into the country and you have to show some proof of onward travel if you are to get through costums. After arriving ecuador we cancelled the tickets in Cuenca, and a month later, now, we finally got our money back!

Next stop on our journey is Puyo, which lies in the start of the amazonian rainforest.

mucho gusto