¡Hola!

Baños (meaning baths) is one of Ecuador's main tourist towns and is a pleasant getaway for Ecuadorians and foreigners alike.Sitting at the base of a massive active volcano, Volcan Tungurahua (which last erupted nastily in 2006), Baños is not necessarily a sensible place to stay a long time, but certainly an easy place to.There is a laid back vibe about the town and lots of fun activities to do, like hiring a buggy or quad bike, getting pampered in one of the many spas, or visiting the hot baths for which Baños is famous.We ended up staying there a few days mainly because I got a proper stomach bug for the first time on the trip and was resigned to staying in the room for a good 48 hours.This wasn't so bad as we actually had a really nice set up in a pleasant hostel: we had a desk in the room with free WiFi, a nice kitchen and a covered outdoor dining area with an open wood fire in the middle.I did manage to have a nice massage though, before I fell ill, and we also visited the Piscina de La Virgen baths, which were a bit tatty and tired looking but certainly popular with the locals.After a few cycles of sitting in the red hot pool then plunging into an almost unfeasibly icy cool pool - which was actually really invigorating - the novelty quickly wore off and we headed home.On our last day in Baños we did try to have a bit of fun and hired a couple of mountain bikes to try out the long downhill route through the valley towards Puyo, which passes a number of spectacular gorges and waterfalls, including one called Pailon del Diablo which you can climb behind... unfortunately the weather was against us on that day and we rode headlong into the rain for about an hour before deciding to cut our losses and hitch a lift back in a pick-up truck.The photos say it all really!

Being in Baños, with all its western vulgarities, made me reflect once more on the very genuine and beautiful indigenous culture we had been immersed in whilst trekking the Quilotoa loop, which I forgot to properly mention before.The locals you find in the big towns and cities in South America, and in essentially ALL of Central America, are basically the same mobile phone-toting, T-shirt-wearing, burger-scoffing type of folks that you would expect to see in North America... a sort of massive obesity crisis in the making.Ok, so you can find isolated communities of indigenous peoples in Central America, but they are usually trapped in a bitter struggle to keep their autonomy and traditions intact.In Ecuador though, for the first time, we saw hundreds of normal families going about their daily lives wearing traditional dress.Both men and women would wear delightful felt pork-pie hats, usually in green or black, and often with a feather from a peacock tucked into the ribbon.With the cold weather, everyone would wear beautiful alpaca wool ponchos over their jackets, and the women would normally finish off the dignified look with a long skirt, traditional socks pulled right up, and a pair of neat, polished shoes.We watched in amazement as we saw the women achieve amazing feats dressed this way, like deftly wrapping up a little baby and the weekly shopping into a single blanket wrapped round them, all whilst standing up in a bus bouncing down a potholed track - it was all wonderfully humbling.We looked forward to seeing more of this as we headed South into Peru and Bolivia.

R&M

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