Friday, August 1

Well, I'm propped up on Sara's floor mattress listening to beloved music! Can you believe it? I'd say this is a much-needed de-stress session. Last night, in classic Ecuadorian fashion, I waited up till 1:30 AM for Azu and Fabri to get home. They told me "stay up because we'll be back in 40 minutes and we want to help you burn those picture CDs. So I ended up waiting, droopy-eyed, for hours and hours and then when they got home the computer was locked in Juan Carlos's room, who had evidently been there the whole time and could have helped me. so it all unfolded like usual in this silly slapstick "this could have been done in five minutes three hours ago" kind of way. Long and short of it, I had to get up at 6 Am the next morning to do it then and they were in such a rush to leave for the beach that all our final goodbyes were rushed and unsatisfying and then I got ripped off by a cab driver. whew.

OK, BANOS!
The bus ride was stunning in the same way the changing of seasons is for me--I've come to expect it but it still takes my breath away. The other thing that is to be expected on Ecuadorian bus rides is trashy, violent, sex-filled movies that are unfit for the children on the bus (or for any of us for that matter) in which Asians are bad guys and buff white men satiate their lust for Asian blood and guns and women. Sort of a weird juxtaposition with the serene mountain scenery.

We arrived in the evening and found our $5 a night hotel. Contrary to what one might expect from such a price, our room was generously furnished with four beds, a private toilet/shower and a stunning view of hte steamy, waterfall-laden mountains. Beneath the waterfall was a group of thermal baths. We steamed around in these for a while, until about 10.

Then we played heated rounds of card games. Gabriel and Esteban like to make fun of the current trendy intellectual jargon used at such esteemed liberal arts colleges as Sara's and mine, to distinguish "third world" countries. So Sara and I took them on in the game "cuarenta" as a team, chanting "yeah global north!" to counterbalance their whooping and high-fiving and general "global south" jubilation.

IN the morning over a $1.20 breakfast, Sara convinced us to rent bikes (instead of taking an open air bus) to venture through the mountains to various waterfalls. The minute we started out it began to rain pretty substantially. The next half an hour was a mix of misery and exhilaration. Wet cold clothes sticking to legs trying to pedal while we're cruising wildly through the moist valley clouds between lush expanses rising up around us. At one point, part of the path was blocked from a small waterfall above us, drowning the path and rushing town to the river below. We had to take off our socks and shoes and wade through. I would say it was a couple of hours of riding. It stopped raining after about half an hour and the steam rose around us. We were relatively alone for most of the trek, although we came across a crowed of gogglers at the bungee jumping bridge and stopped for a while to clutch each other and witness potential doom. When we got into a sort of mountain town, we left our bikes at a restaurant and took the jungley path to this huge waterfall (that was much more tourist-infested than any of our previous journey). Following the advise of a friendly ecologist we crawled through a sort of rock ledge cave that took us directly underneath the roaring waterwall of the 200 ft. cascade. wow!
We ate back at the restaurant we left our bikes at (that was the deal) and took a hitched a ride with our bikes on a paid truck. I had been a little sick the whole day and rested in the room for a while (thinking about parasites) while they rode around the town a while and watched from a safe vantage point as a semi-distant volcano spewed ash into the air (evidently Baños has period evacuations due to the lava expulsion of this particular volcano). The rest of the evening was relaxing- watching a soccer game, more card-playing, dinner, and a lengthy Spanish chat with Esteban while Sara and Gabriel were off catching up.
The return trip was significantly more stressful. I was really cripplingly sick already, which wasn't helped by the mountain-ledge careening of the bus. Then, burn rubber filled our noses and we all had to evacuate the bus and pile into a different one with standing room only. I managed to get a seat, though (next to a woman with a chicken clucking plaintively under some cloth.)
Then Sara and I sort of argued with Gabriel (my first real argument in spanish!) who was being really vague about my sickness and parasites in general.
Overall, weird stomach troubles aside, it was a glorious trip! I'm so glad we decided to go at the last minute.