Baños

We next went to Baños, a popular town to visit in Ecuador. The views here were amazing, but unfortunately it rained almost the whole time we were here, so we were not able to see as much. There is actually a volcano erupting there right now called the Tungurahua and it is keeping most tourists away. It is the biggest eruption they have had since the early 1900's. It has been erupting in smaller amounts since the 90's, but while we were in Quito, the big eruption happened. Fortunately, it didn't affect Baños because the lava is only coming down on the other side of the volcano. However, people on that side have been gravely affected unfortunately. We were not able to see much at all because of the cloud coverage, but we did see some smoke coming out the top. Normally, we would have been able to see lava flowing down at night. I guess we just have to imagine it for now.

We decided one day to rent bikes to explore around even though it was raining and the scenery that we saw was absolutely fantastic. It was so green with awesome landscape. We took a cable car type thing across one of the gorges and it was a pretty sketchy operation. It did show beautiful views though of the valley and a nice waterfall.


We came to this one waterfall called El Pailon del Diablo (the Devil's Cauldron). We hiked to it and weren't sure why the guy had ponchos for the walk up. We ignored it, but quickly realized when we got up there. The waterfall was crazy! The devil was definitely doing some work to keep you away! I didn't want to stay away though and got completely soaked so that I was ringing out my socks afterwards. The first picture is me coming back from getting soaked. The second is the waterfall from a bridge below where you don't get wet. The video below perhaps shows the sound and power of the waterfall. I suckered Scott into standing there for a few seconds.

Baños itself was a beautiful town, but pictures can't describe. Here is one picture of a nice church in the center. There was a lot of music here too. Every night when we had dinner, a musical group or person would come in and play a few songs for tips. It was very nice. This group was great, so we video'd for a little while.