Baños: Final Destination Ecuador

Before I get into my Baños experience, I would like to say a few words about the word HOSTAL.  Because this was pointed out to me by someone near and dear, I thought I'd clear this up for anyone else curious about it: in Spanish, you spell hostal with an "a" not an "e."  Mom's always looking out for my spelling mistakes, and I appreciate it, but this time, I was just using the Spanish word. ;) Also, hostal is not exactly what you may be thinking.  They are actually hotels with private rooms, etc, etc, they just call them hostals for some reason.  I have not been staying in a dormish room with other crazy backpackers!   So, there you are and onto the post:

So after leaving the rainforest, I hopped on a bus from Tena to Banos that took about 5.5 hours.  It should have only taken 4.5, but the bus broke down and the driver had to fix the problem before we could move on.  I finally made it to Banos around 3pm on Wednesday, checked into my hostal "Plantas y Blanco," and went for a vuelta around the town to see what was there.  It was raining when I got in, but the place was still soooo beautiful.  Banos is set in the valley of gorgeous mountains and a huge (still active) volcano.  As I would soon hypothesize, Banos is like a physical version of Final Destination. If you don't die by volcanic eruption, mudslide, cliffside road collapsing into nothingness, biking tragedies, a precarious cable car, or perhaps drown in the river, you can always go bungee jumping off the bridges here, and when you try to leave hold on for dear life in the back of a pick up truck speeding like a demon around hairspin turns.  

Anyway, it's a spa town and is called "Banos" because it has naturally hot and cold thermal baths (hot springs) with supposedly healing properties.  When it's raining, there is a mist over the tops of the mountains and the place seriously just looks magical.  I was saying to some of the people I met there that it looked like a set from Lord of the Rings - which I know is actually New Zealand, but maybe you get the picture.

Anyway, I made a few friends at the hostal almost immediately - Laurel and Michaela, both from New York City, strangely enough.  We had breakfast together on Thursday morning on the glassed in roof deck of the hostal, which looks out onto the beautiful mountains.  By Thursday morning, the rain had turned into full blown torrential downpouring - which was nice to see from the inside, but did not make me want to go outside for any reason whatsoever.  As we were chatting over coffees and the fabulous breakfasts they have at Plantas, I thought I heard thunder.  It would have made sense since it was raining so hard, but by the looks on my the waitresses faces, my first reaction was - the volcano is going to erupt!!  The volcano last erupted in August of 2006, the whole town had to be evacuated and it was covered in a thick ash. But after further inspection, it wasn't a volcano eruption - the noise was from several massive mudslides.  We saw them happening all over the mountains.  You could literally watch as hundreds of trees were falling (being forced) down the mountain, taking everything out in their path and leaving a dark brown, muddy gouge in their place.  This was crazy for a number of reasons, the first of which being that there are also houses built into the sides of the mountains and we saw one mudslide hit just to the side of one home.  So scary!!

Because of the mudslides, the whole town basically shut down on Thursday, and we heard rumors that there was a "river in the road" which ended up meaning that in the only road out of town, there was a stretch of water 20 meters long.  They stopped allowing people to come in and out of the city for the rest of the day.  The baths were closed and by the time the rain finally stopped in the early afternoon, everyone living in Banos (including us) made their way to the rivers to see hundreds of tree trunks rushing furiously downstream, along with giant boulders rolling down... all of this having come down from the top of the mountain.  It was crazy!!

On Friday, it continued raining, and the roads were still out, so I couldn't have left town even if I had wanted to.  I met up with my friend Steve from Cuenca on Friday, and he, Michaela, Laurel and I went mountainbiking on Friday morning -- in the freezing, cold rain.  It really was gorgeous though, and even though we only made it about 20km of the whole 60km journey (too cold and rainy), we saw so many beautiful waterfalls and just general natural beauty.  I cannot imagine living with that as my permanent backdrop.  It makes any minor irritation or whatever seem so small, literally, in the face of these huge mountains.

On Saturday, the sun finally came out and it was absolutely gorgeous and warm and wonderful.  GORGEOUS, I cannot even describe in words, so hopefully the photos will help you to understand.  The four of us went to the baths in the morning.  There are about 6 different places where you can go to the hot springs, but we opted for the Piscinas del Virgen which is supposedly the best.  It costs $1.50 to get in, you change clothes in a locker, check your stuff and then choose your pool: the hot pool is about 120 degrees, the cold pool is about 50 degrees and the medium pool is somewhere perfectly in the middle.  We went into all three (a number of times) and the medium pool really just felt wonderful.  They say there are healing qualities about the water, and I could maybe see that.  It just made me feel so energized and wonderful.  It was great. After hanging out for a while at the pools and grabbing some italian food for lunch with my friends, we all decided we would try our luck at leaving town. 

We packed up all of our stuff and headed to the bus station.  No buses in and out of Banos.  There had been another mudslide overnight and now "the road out of town was gone."  We thought, surely the road was really not gone?  Someone at the bus station suggested we take a truck out of town, as they were somehow able to leave where buses and other cars were not.  The truck took us to the police checkpoint (where they were stopping all outgoing and incoming traffic).  They told us we would have to walk about 15 minutes past the checkpoint and pick up another truck.  We did this and then paid a man $20 to take us all the way to the next town an hour away, Ambato, where we could get a bus out of town. (Only in Ecuador.) About half-way to Ambato, we passed the problem in the road... and literally half of the two lane road on the edge of a cliff was just gone. I have no idea how this is going to be repaired, but I'm just glad we got out when we did, as there are literally no "alternate routes" in this country to speak of.

Next stop: Quilotoa.