Baños, enough said.

River rafting in Baños, no pun intended.

Let me just say that my plna here is to shy away from my emotionally and comedically stunted tendencies and leave the fodder of a town with a name like Baños alone. (1)  However, I must say that a certain irony must be mentioned here.  I´ve heard tell of certain people (I´ll leave them unnamed) berating my stomach, as well as my ¨lack of sack¨, due to my being ¨put to the toiled¨(my saying, clearly the blog is going to the proverbial John Crapper as I´m beginning to quote myself) by the Cuy.  In my own defense I proceeded to spend the next 2 weeks not far from a toilet.  Torturous bus rides, sleepless nights, dreams of diarrhea in perpetuity and a general malais e over my entire being.  Now I know it wasn´t to last.  The cure, an arrival to Baños. (2)

With that settled, we can move on to things of a more grand and mature nature.  Baños sits under Vulcan Tungurahua, one of the more active Volcanoes in South America, which is why you are unable, or rather disallowed, from hiking to its peak.(3)  This is intriguing to me and is one of many factors helping to breed my thoroughly immoral, not to mention morbid, solipiist, self-obssesed and moronic desire to witness an active volcano.  Let me explain myself.  You see, I don´t want a full-on explosion, nor destruction of humanity, culture, private property (God Bless the USA) or living souls.  No, I simply want to see some magma in a crater inside a volcano, with perhaps a few bits of ash (not enough to close an airport or shut down all of Western Europe, mind you); Just enough ash to captivate, to be awed by nature, to feel the vivacity of the Earth...a smidgeon of volcanic activity, to be precise.  And I know this to be possible because others of a more fortuitous ilk have told us tales of such adventure.  Alas, it was not to be in the cards for this band of lovers (gimme a break, it´s a play on words).  The volcano in Baños sat dormant for our week stay, silent, looming, but mostly just taunting my dreams of volcanic glory.  It was doomed from the get go: A) No hiking to the summit and B) before the volcano could provide its show of natural force, the Ecaudorian military decided to provide its own eruptive disturbance. 

I won´t go into much detail, just to say that Beth and I rushed to an Internet cafe after reading on the news that the Ecuadorian president, Raphael Correia, had been taken captive by the military.  As we raced through the normally active town, an ominous silence sat over every corner, with each and every citizen gathering round their televisions watching the drama unfold, the bullets, tear gas and  any other object-that-could-be-of-mild-to-severe-danger-if-used-as-a-projectile hurled through the air with abandon.  We thought we were about to become entrenched in the 1980´s all over again with military coups dominating Latin America.  Unbeknownest to us at this point, it was simply a protest (albeit a work stoppage segued into protest by police and military personnel--Ecuador, not exactly the bastion of stability it´s been made out to be over the last 10 years) gone awry, which [speculatively] the President is harnessing to cement a more authoratarian role for himself--something he appears fo have begun over the last few years and well before this ¨coup d´etat¨ (his words, not mine).  All this is to say we were nervous and thus decided to abide the State Department and hole up in Baños for a week.

Our self-imposed city arrest forced us into action.  After two days of perpetual crime shows, including CSI: Everycity, we decided it was time to leave the confines of our cel...room for something other than food and a walk. No volcano, no problem.  After getting cat-called--really there is no more appropriate phrase for what tour operators do to gringos, male or female, in SA--by every agent in Banos, we finally sucked it up and fell for the used-bicycle salesman routine.  $5 each, all day use of bikes, and the idylic destination of no less than five cliffside waterfalls.  We biked, we viewed, I sweated, and we conquered the easily conquerable.  Willow could have done this ride on a unicycle, but we managed to stretch a solid day out of it.  We almost did a 1km zip line, except the line was saggy and rusted, ran by a roadside family and looked like you had to go down using an old bent hanger.  Not confidence inspiring.  We enjoyed watching the "bungee jumpers", though bungee swing might be more accurate.  $15 for two people is a steal, but both of us were luke-warm about doing it, so, we watched. We rode some more, we saw a few more waterfalls and ate some PBJ's.  Good day.

This waterfall falls onto the road.  A gorgeous bike ride indeed.

Waterfalls...Helmets...Tiempo Libre

The highlight of Banos, for us, was not the internal strife of a nation, but water rafting. (4). Beth has braved Class I rapids and I haven't been since I was 9.  But the prospect of, supposedly, Class IV rapids (out of VI) was too much to pass up--not to mention a price tag of $22.50 each.  Who knew Banos would be bargain basement. (5)

So, we embarked upon 2 1/2 hours of rapids, Class III & IV, with a few breaks in between--once to see a recently created waterfall (due to a rockslide) and another venture up a tributary in which we jumped off rocks into the river and the guide gave us a pseudo-drown session in which he dunked our heads under a waterfall then proceeded to have us float downstream, emulating what we would experience if thrown from the raft.  Conveniently this occurred after our first level IV rapids, but presumably less dangerous than the forthcoming ones.

The most ecstatic person at the finish line: The Guide.

This proved true, at least to my limited--although to be fair when you almost get thrown out of a boat that is emerged in water and just barreled over a rock four times as large as said boat the perceived danger seems obviously self-apparent--knowledge of river rafting.  Beth later said that my entire upper body was out of the boat and in the river and since our boat was completely immersed from the water (fall) flowing over the rock, that seems plausible.  The one thing keeping me in the boat was my near ball'n'chain death grip to the foot rope. (6). The girl next to the Beth later said she too almost went swimming, which Beth doesn't remember as she was overwhelmed with worry due to my limited swimming ability. (7)  Thirty minutes and a few more, though less harrowing, rapids later we were finished, to our utter dismay. (8).

River rafting is amazing.  Coups, even falsely named coups, are not.  Bikes are cool.  Crime shows are not (except Law and Order: SVU, starring Ice Cube as detective Tutuola).  And Banos was a fantastic place to bide our time before moving on through Ecuador.    


(1) If you don´t know what baño means, clearly you´re UnAmerican.
(2) Double irony, in fact.  My irony being I spent little time in the bathroom in Baños.  The double irony of it all being that we happened to be in Baños as Ecuador went to shit, but that´s getting ahead of the narrative.
(3) Purportedly the biggest Volcano in Ecuador, it goes by such sobriquets as: ¨The Throat of Fire¨ and ¨The Black Giant¨.  
(4) the name of the town itself is actually representative of the baths which adorn the city.  Being located under an active volcano creates thermal springs and an easily harnessed hot water source.  So, the town built a truckload of pools (concrete, like ours) then filled them with heinously discolored thermal water, from the enticing poop brown (makes Banos a double entendre in my book) to the more mysterious lime yellow--a color that is quite indescribable.  Needless to say, We went swimming in the river while rafting, but not into the overly crowded, and quite aptly named, pool bathrooms.
(5) Our hostel, a private with an ensuite bathroom and cable television, was only $4 each a night.  And there was a kitchen.
(6) to keep begineer, and probably expert as well, rafters in the boat there are ropes going across the bottom of the boat where your feet are located.  You hook your feet between the boat and this rope, so when you hit a rapid, a rock or any other form of jolting your feet keep you anchored to the boat and thus in the boat.  I had my feet in up to my ankles and the bruises to prove it, the next day.
(7) I beat Beth in freestyle a month prior, to her great dismay.
(8) both Beth and an Aussie girl were cajoled into riding on the front of the boat.  Picture those mechanical bulls in Mexico, but on the front of a plastic boat and with class III rapids waiting to welcome you to their fold. I'd like to say Beth was screaming maniacally, waving her hand in the air like a cowgirl and wearing a wide-brim 10 gallon hat, but it's be only partially true.  After the rapids I did push her off the boat, at the direction of Jorge, our guide.  (9)
(9) Jorge the previous week took the founder of facebook on the same trip and had the Ecuadorian newspaper clipping to prove it.  Jorge was a riot.    

And now, a photo montage of Baños:

Nice Chucks.

Bored in Baños.  Found this t-top in my bag and let Beth talk me into trying it on...and making that face...and doing that pose...and posting in a publicly accessible website.  At least I´m not grabbing the breast of a cardboard cutout of the Secretary of State.

Tunnel Vision.

Slowly turning into, I´m not sure what, but clearly I´m not proud of it.