Bathing in Baños

Our trip to the jungle was followed by a bus ride through central Ecuador to a place called Baños. In English, Baños means ´baths´ so you can safely assume hot springs were in plentiful supply. Actually, it´s kind of like the Ecuadorian equivalent to Queenstown, but not as touristy and cheaper. We were only here for one full day so I couldn´t get in everything I wanted to do sightseeing-wise, but it was probably good nonetheless as we were fairly rushed in the end.

Baños is located in the shadow of Mt Tungurahua, which is probably Ecuador´s most active volcano. Only a few weeks before I got there it had been going crazy, so I was pretty keen to see some lava spewing forth. Unfortunately, I only saw big ash plumes spewing forth but it was good to see anyway.

Our big activity whilst we were here was to check out a number of impressive waterfalls along the local river. We biked about 30 km in total and saw about 5 or 6 waterfalls. The most impressive was the final one, named Pailon del Diablo or ´Pot of the Devil´. It´s obvious when you you see the waterfall why its a pot, but the face of a devil in the side of the cliff was a bit more of a stretch. When I have posted photos you can make up your own mind!

Also as part of our bike tour, we did some canyoning. For those of you not familiar with this (like me prior to actually doing it) canyoning is pretty much abseiling down waterfalls. We went down five waterfalls and it was a great sensation having the water cascade over you as you descended. It took us a few hours to do the five waterfalls, with probably the highest being maybe 25 to 30 metres high. A really enjoyable day and one that tired us all out. I think I would like to do a lot more canyoning in the future after this experience.

Baños was a nice quaint town and it´s somewhere I would like to go back to if I return to Ecuador. We were going to go to a lookout at night to check out lava coming out of the mountain, but as we were all too knackered from the biking and canyoning, coupled with the fact we had a long bus ride to Cuenca the next day, we all had an early night. Oh and yes, as indicated by the title, we did get to the hot pools and have a splash around. It was actually like bathing in dirty bath water (colourwise) but it was steaming hot and soothed the joints nicely!