Ecuador

Our next destination after Mindo was Baños. Baños is a pleasant but quite touristy town which is surrounded by beautiful green mountains. There are quite a lot of things to keep people occupied there so we ended up staying for 5 nights.

Baños takes its name from the thermal baths that are scattered around the town and this was traditionally the main appeal of the place. Incidentally, 'baño' is also the word used for toilet in most of South America! The baths that we went to, on a couple of occasions, had four pools of varying temperatures that people would switch between. Probably the best thing to do was go from the hottest one into the cold plunge pool (or vice versa).

Another activity which is now popular in Baños is cycling from the town down to the village of Rio Verde. This route is more about the scenery than the cycling and takes you past a number of waterfalls on the way down. At one point on the route you can take a cable car over a gorge where there are particularly spectacular views of one of the waterfalls and surrounding mountains. When we reached Rio Verde we saw another waterfall called el Pailón del Diablo (the Devils´s Cauldron) then got a taxi back up the hill to Baños.

The hostel that we were staying in was quite a social place and had a roof terrace where people would meet in the evenings to drink, listen to music, play cards etc. The roof terrace also had amazing panoramic views of the town during the day. On quite a few of the nights that we were there we went into the town to go to some bars with the people from the hostel.

The hostel also had a steam bath which we visited on three of the mornings that we were there. It was quite a long process (each session took about 45 minutes) that largely involved sitting in a wooden box, with only your head poking out, whilst getting steamed for four minutes at a time. In between bouts of steaming you would encounter cold water in various ways. These included sitting in a pool of cold water, having it tipped over you from a bucket and getting sprayed with a hose.

On our final day in Baños we hired a buggy which is basically a large go-kart that has two seats. Quite unbelievably, they allow your to drive these things on the road with all the other traffic. We followed the same route as we did on the bikes a few days earlier. This was quite a fun activity, particularly for Mike who doesn't have a drivers licence and had never driven on roads before. At one stage, on the way back, we had to drive the buggy through a windy, dark and fairly long tunnel. A large bus ended up getting stuck behind us which actually turned out to be a bit of a blessing as the lights on the buggy weren't the strongest and we were struggling to see the road in the tunnel. Mike was driving at this point! We did make it back to Baños safely though and ended up going out for one of the best meals we've had the whole trip at a Swiss cafe.

From Baños we got a bus to Riobamba. Riombamba is a fairly nondescript town and the main reason that people go there is to go on the Nariz del Diablo (Devil´s Nose) train journey. The day after we arrived we had breakfast, with the majority of the guests in the hotel, at 5.30am in order to be at the train station in time to get a good spot on the roof of the train! Sitting on the roof of the slow moving train is the main appeal of the journey as it provides the perfect vantage point to take in the views. Of course the novelty of siting on the roof is also part of the attraction.

We returned to Riobamba by bus after the train ride and were up early the next morning to get a bus to Cuenca. This took longer than expected as a result of the bus repeatedly breaking down but we still arrived by mid-afternoon as the driver and other guys from the bus always managed to fix the problem(s).

Cuenca is a fairly large colonial city and probably has slightly more eye-catching churches and plazas than other similar places in Latin America. It is regarded as Ecuador´s finest city and has quite a European feel making it a pleasant place to spend a few days. We didn´t do a huge amount when were there though apart from take in the sites, do a bit of shopping and eat at a decent Mexican restaurant.

We left Cuenca on Saturday morning and got a bus to Vilcabamba so that we could stay at a hostel called Izhcayluma. Izhcayluma is quite high up in some beautiful mountains and is owned by the comically named German duo, Peter and Dieter. There was a really good crowd of people there at the same time as us so was a perfect place to spend Ellie´s birthday.

We were there for three days but didn´t really take advantage of any of the daytime activities. We just relaxed at the hostel and enjoyed the views. At night things got a bit more lively as they have a good bar in the hostel. On separate nights they organized pool, table tennis and poker tournaments. For the pool and table tennis tournaments there were bottles of rum up for grabs and they always came to our table! The staff at the hostel also gave our table a bottle of rum for Ellie´s birthday as well as baking her a cake and giving her various other free drinks!

The border crossing from Colombia to Ecuador ran smoothly and we arrived in Quito by the early evening. We got a taxi to a hostel (which had a roof terrace with excellent views of the city) then went for dinner with a Colombian guy called Juan Sebastian who we met on the bus. At the restaurant Ellie and Sebastian went for cheaper half portions which cost $1.50 but Mike chose the full portion for $3 - these turned out to be exactly the same size!

The next morning we explored Quito old town. The first place we went to was Plaza de Independencia. There happened to be some kind of independence celebrations going on and we caught the end of the speech given by the President.

There were soldiers marching in formation and various people in fancy dress entertaining the crowds, in quite random ways. At one point Ellie was taken from the crowd by a woman dressed in a kind of green pixie outfit and put on a stretcher where people dressed as doctors and nurses pretended to inject her with a large plastic syringe. It was all very strange and we didn't really know what to make of it but everyone was laughing and it was all being filmed for TV!

We then had a further look around the Old Town at churches, plaza's and important buildings.

We bumped into Sebastian and he had arranged to meet up with a couple of girls from Quito in the New Town, one of whom was a friend of his friend. We went with him and spent the rest of the day in a bar which had 2 for 1 cocktails. We drank a lot of Mojitos and it turned into an enjoyable drunken evening.

The following day we went with Sebastian to the Mitad del Mundo, where the equator line is. We first went to the Equatorial Line Monument, which is on the equatorial line determined by French explorers in 1736. Inside the monument is the Museo Ethnografico which exhibits artefacts relating to indigenous cultures.

However, the original equator line as called by the French is actually 150m out according to recent GPS measurements (not a bad effort for 1736 though!). On this line where the latitude is actually 0'0'0'' is the Museo Inti-Ñan. At this museum they do various experiments relating to the gravitational pull of the equator. These include seeing water in a sink fall straight down on the equator line, clockwise in the southern hemisphere and anti-clockwise in the northern hemisphere; showing that you have less resistance to force on the equator line; and allowing the tourists to have a go at balancing an egg on a nail (which was our favourite!).

We left Quito the next day and headed up north to the Pacific Coast. We spent a couple of nights in Atacames, which is a fairly busy beach resort. We weren't planning on going out on the first night but we ended up bumping into Ryan, a Canadian guy who we met in Cali. We had a few Caipiriña's, a local drink, in one of the many bars along the beach front with Ryan and a German guy, Max. We then had a few more back at their hostel and ended up almost missing our hostel's 3am curfew!

We spent a bit of time on the beach the next day, but despite being so close to the equator is isn't very warm and was very cloudy. Mike played football on the beach with some locals who almost started fighting a number of times during the game as they were always betting on which team would score the next goal!

After Atacames we got a bus to Mompiche, a few hours further along the coast. Mompiche is a rustic little fishing village which is at the early stages of being developed into a more popular resort, although the roads remain unpaved at the moment. Again the weather was cloudy and it was quite drizzly. We still had a good time though and did a bit of surfing, ate seafood and had a night out. We went to a bar on a beach a few times that is owned by some French and Portuguese guys where they serve excellent pizza. We also went to a club down on of the side streets where drink was really cheap and lots of locals and Ecuadorian holiday makers were dancing.

On the way back down south after Mompiche, we got off the bus a few hours before Quito in order to go to Mindo. In the manner we have become accustomed to, we were dropped at a junction in the road and had to wait for some form of transport to take us the rest of the way. This time it was three mountain bikers in a mini bus. Mindo is a small town surrounded by cloud forest and is a nice place for walking and relaxing. The hostel we were in had a large balcony with comfy sofas and hammock so spent quite a lot of time there! On one of the days we were there we walked to the top of a large hill, took a sketchy cable car contraption over a gorge, and walked a trail through the forest that took us to four different waterfalls.