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Our first South American camping experience was near Baños. We stayed in a small place called Rio Verde as the foreign office don't recommend people to actually stay in Baños as the nearby Tungurahua volcano is active. The first day I spent in Baños while Martin went Canyoning. Canyoning is a sport where you navigate down a river with waterfalls by a combination of abseiling, jumping if the pools are deep enough and using a zip-wire. The highest jump he did was 8m and the highest abseil was 16-18m which was quite difficult as the rocks were slippy. In the afternoon we met up again and watched some of our group do a bridge swing (jump off a bridge attached to a rope, kind of bungee style but without the elastic).
The following day we spent 4 hours horse riding around Baños, the volcano was covered in cloud so we didn't see it that day but did have good views over the town. We followed that with a welcome massage, but we still ached a lot the next day. We had great weather there but had a big thunderstorm the last night which was fun in a tent and meant we had a wet tent to pack the next morning at 6am!
We spent our 7th wedding anniversary on the road with a full day drive to Cuenca. We did get to see the volcano as we drove through and it was covered in snow. We had a 7am start arriving at 5.45pm after a 340km journey. Again the roads were unsurfaced in places and acending the mountains often meant we were travelling in a zig-zag fashion. The terrain changed along the way from mountainous jungle to mountainous farmed land with either cattle or small crops (all tended by hand). We stopped in a remote area to make sandwiches for lunch on the side of the road and soon a bunch of locals appeared a stood a little way off to stare at the strange 'gringos', they hung around until we packed up a left.
On our free day in Cuenca we just wandered around the town shopping and looking at the markets. We spent some time people watching, several of the locals wear traditional dress which is more colourful than in Otavalo and everyone seems to have a hat on. Cuenca is at a much higher altitude so it's cooler. This was our last stop in Ecuador and tomorrow we head for Peru.
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