Second of four Ecuador posts in the ongoing Shameless Archive Padding Exercise.
Spent the last two days in Baños, a very touristy town ringed by mountains about 3.5 hours south of Quito. The town itself isn't the main attraction, though (thank god -- I haven't seen such a concentration of Italian restaurants outside of Italy); the pull of this place is the activities you can do. From canyoning to rafting to horseback riding to renting hideous dune buggy things you can drive along the highway, the place has a hell of a lot to do. Plus, at the end of the day, you can chill in one of several volcanically heated mineral baths, for example the one at the base of the town's most salient waterfall. Also, Baños has bike rental places figuratively every five meters, and it was this activity that I was most keen to do. After spending one day kind of just hanging around town enjoying the pleasant weather (it's remarkably like a beach town, and very easy to do nothing in), yesterday I woke up to discover the mountains barely visible behind shrouds of fog (clouds?) and an intermittent drizzle-to-light-rain falling. Undaunted, after a delicious breakfast on the rooftop terrace (enclosed, so fear not: no muffins were soggy-fied), I rallied my less-than-thrilled-with-the-weather biking companion, a French girl who was coincidentally on my flight from Miami, and we set off on a pair of serviceable but unglamorous mountain bikes down the highway. Our goal was some waterfall in a town called Rio Verde, about 18 klicks down the road. It is also several hundred meters lower, elevation-wise, so it was the easiest ride of my life.
Setting off through shrouded hillsides into the thickening rain, on bikes whose gears complained for fifteen seconds before shifting, past a whole lot of roadwork, with buses and construction vehicles blaring past every so often, was Stage One: Absurdity. It was, frankly, hilarious. This stage finished with a flourish: a couple hundred meter long more or less pitch-black tunnel, into which one does not venture without checking to see that no buses are in sight behind you. This final obstacle cleared, we entered Stage Two: Vistas.
This stage was characterised by an end to the rain, and the opening up below the road of a gorgeous winding valley dotted by waterfalls, and detours for bikes around all the tunnels. It was awesome. One particularly impressive waterfall had a cable-car set up that took you across the valley and over the waterfall. On the other side you can get off the car (which we did) and wander a little to a lookout right by the waterfall. Already here, only forty-five minutes or so from Baños, we'd descended enough that it was humid, and lush, and all in all much more tropical than the highlands.
After this we resumed our bike glide (I'd say ride but really, the pedalling was minimal) beneath the watchful eyes of four or five circling condors, and at last reached Rio Verde. Here, we were invited to park our bikes by a restauranteur, and subesequently refuelled at his establishment (the food, incidentally, was delicious) before wandering on foot to our ultimate destination, el pailon del diablo, aka the Devil's Cauldron, which, as you might be able to guess, is a waterfall, and the subject of Stage Three: Awesomeness.
They set it up very well at this place: you walk down, and further down, through the now-very-tropical forest, from the top of the ridge, where the town is, way down to where the waterfall is, but they've done it so that you can hear the waterfall get louder and louder but you can't see it until the very end (i.e., until after you've payed your $1 entrance fee).
So you pay, and you walk up a little, and the falls are deafening but you still can't see them, and then suddenly you're right there, staring at the water thundering past from right beside it, in a whirl of spray. And you climb down to viewing platforms closer and closer to the base, or a little further out so you can actually see the whole thing from top to bottom. And there is a sort of tunnel-path that you can crawl through along the side of the cliff, and at the end of it you can actually get behind the waterfall [by going through the waterfall's edge, seemingly - ed.], and we crawled some of the way along this but not all the way because we were going to be sitting on a bus for three hours later in the day, and I had only one pair of pants, and didn't want them to be sopping wet.
And then we got a lift back to town, and soaked for a bit in the thermal springs, and then hopped on a bus back to Quito, which is where I am now. Incidentally, on the bus ride down, it had been all cloudy, while on the way back it was quite clear and it seemed a totally different landscape, and was quite amazing.
And now Monday I head to the jungle for five days.
Originally published via email, June 19, 2009.
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