The next morning poor Soph was still really sick and ended up spending the day at hotel :(. The rest of the group set out for a walk around lovely old town with Beth (tour guide) ending at the Panama hat factory where we could watch the traditional hats being made. Next we walked along the river board ring new town and tried to go to a museum with shrunken heads but unfortunately it was closed being Monday. Back in old town centre we climbed the cathedral for a v...

Waking up early for a big drive day to find out Sophie and 2 others have a really nasty bug. The 3 poor people had to suffer through the day as the truck climbed the windy mountains towards Cuenca. Then 2 hours away from the city Jack broke down in a small country town. A local lady let us sit at the front of her store while we waited for a local bus company to pick us up. It was very chilly at the top of the hill and more torture for the sick people. After a rou...

Close to our camp ground were two huge waterfalls. The smaller one was down a billion steps but the stunning power of the waterfall and the pretty yellow birds were worth the slog back up to the road. The second waterfall in Rio Verde town, Pailon del Diablo was ginormous - fuelled by an entire river. Some crazy bridges and stairs had been built so you could get right in close to the impressive waterfall. Sophie made an attempt with others to go into Banos town ...

The next morning 12 of us including our 2 tour guides headed to the river for white water rafting. In two colourful rafts we had a practice on land before braving the fast moving river. The recent rain meant the river was quite high and the rapids pretty intimidating. After being yelled at quite a few times we started to work better as a team :). Half way through the 2 extra rafts with us finished up, turns out we hadn't attacked any grade 5 rapids yet!!! This is...

After a long drive we arrived in the stunning Banos area ready for our first camping experience of the trip. We stopped at a small cafe making us amazing empanadas (kind of a pie) in ham n cheese and desert ones like banana n chocolate - so delicious! We arrived at the lovely small campground owned by ex-tucan guides which was surrounded by mountains. They had two beautiful friendly dogs and we pretty much had the place to ourselves.