This weekend we went to a little town about 3 hours south of Quito called Baños. The city is named for its thermal baths (baños) that surround it. (More on that later...) We left early Friday morning and set out for the south bus terminal in Quito. It took us about an hour just to reach the terminal. From there, we found a company that has buses leaving for Baños every 5 minutes and bought our tickets for $2.50. Actually, we bought tickets to Ambato, a city about 3/4 of the way to Baños. We were sent on a mission from Guada to find one of her cousins who runs a food stall in the Ambato central market.
Anyway, we set out from Quito and had a beautiful drive to Ambato. We passed within a few miles of Cotopaxi, one of the tallest mountains in Ecuador. We got to Ambato, which turned out to be a much larger city than we anticipated. We had to take a taxi to the central market, but we did indeed find Guada´s cousin working in her food stall. We ate lunch there and had some really good potato cakes, chorizo sausage, and fried eggs (with a fresh coconut and blackberry milkshakes as usual.) After lunch, we caught a bus back to the Ambato terminal and finally got on a bus for our real destination, Baños.
Baños turned out to be one of the prettiest city´s we have seen yet. It is situated between a very large volcano and another large mountain. The volcano is still active and had a pretty major eruption about 6 years ago that wiped out some of the nearby towns. Baños, however, was saved (by the Virgin of the Holy Waters according to the residents.) We found a nice little hostal that was recommended to us a few weeks ago by some Americans we met in Mindo. For 7 bucks we got clean beds, hot showers, and a great pancake and fruit breakfast. On Saturday, we went on a chiva bus tour (basically just an open air bus with benches in the back) that took us outside the town on one of the prettiest drives in the whole country. The road descends about 1800 meters in 60 km and runs through a canyon following a large river most of the way. We saw several large waterfalls, and stopped at one to hike down to it. ( I forget the name now.) It was about 200 feet tall and required a pretty steep 20 minute climb to get in and out.
Other than that, did not really do a whole lot in Baños. We tried waking up early Saturday to go visit the baños, but arrived to find that it was already full by 7:30. Rather than sit elbow to elbow in a soup of gringos and Ecuadorians, we decided to just go back and eat our free breakfast waiting for us back at the hostel.
This weekend we are planning on going back to Otavalo. There are some little villages nearby that we did not visit the first time we went there. Also, now that Mrs. Dotson is coming we can go buy some bigger stuff since we don´t have to worry about hauling it all through South America with us after we leave Ecuador :)
