A Weekend In Baños

I'm now currently in Montañita, a little village at the coast. The last few days have been very busy and there was no time for a Blog update. Last weekend I have been with Joke, Marion, Will, John Paul, Hannes and Chris in Baños. This is not a toilet, it is a region in central Ecuador. It's also surrounded by Volcanoes as Quito but it is a special place for outdoor activities and thermal springs. We arrived Friday evening and met some other Europeans at dinner. Later we teamed up with them and visited some bars and had fun. Before going home we went to the local sightseeing attraction - a big waterfall. Spontaneously there was an idea to strip our clothes and get into the waterfall - at 3:00 in the morning! We had a lot of fun fooling around in the cold water. Some random Ecuadorians, still awake at this time, had cheap and fun entertainment by watching us. The next idea was to join some Ecuadorians having a party beside their car on the parking place beside the waterfall. We joined them in our wet underwear and had even a dance with them.

The rest of the Baños adventure was also very nice. On Saturday we had an extensive hike at the surrounding mountains. We could manage to see the volcano Tungurahua spitting out massive loads of ash and loud rumbling noise. After the hike we managed to get home in a truck.

On our final day, on Sunday, we went Canyoning. This is a sport when you hike down a canyon and jump or use ropes to climb down some obstacles. It was great fun and afterwards we had also nice grilled fish fresh from the river.

The only problem we had was our ride back to Quito. It was heavily raining at the afternoon and that caused a massive landslide. The bus had a delay of several hours and we finally arrived back in Quito at Monday morning at 1:00. Overall it was a perfect weekend with great friends!