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December 03, 2004

Baņos Bit and Pieces

Baņos, Ecuador

Wednesday - Friday, December 1 - 3, 2004

Three days of necessary rest and recuperation in Baņos were relatively uneventful but entirely worthwhile. The following are a few quick, general passages summarizing the experience there.

The Bus Ride

At 4 AM on Wednesday, we caught an overnight bus from Teņa to Baņos. It was not the nicest ride I have ever had. It was probably the worst ride Laura has ever had.

"I donīt feel well," she told me as we walked to the bus station. "It might be something I ate."

It was. Fifteen minutes into the trip, bouncing up and down on dirt roads, black diesel fuel seeping into the cabin through the windows, Laura became sick. In the central aisle. We cleaned up what we could and got her a plastic bag. The bus attendant regarded it as a routine event and finished most of our clean-up effort for us. He also gave Laura a plastic bag, though it was approximately the size of a sock and utterly useless.

The roads didnīt improve much during the next several hours and neither did Lauraīs stomache. By the time we rolled into Baņos at 8 AM, there was nothing left for her system to expunge. We headed for a hostal we had investigated ahead of time.

[As a side note, Iīm sure Laura really appreciates me relating all of the foregoing details about her illness here.]

Uncharitable Christian

Sometimes hostals and restaurants in South America like to advertise the fact that they are under European or North American "management." This isn`t necessarily a reason for a glowing recommendation, however.

After our arrival in Baņos, we took a taxi to a hostal called Isla de Baņos, which is recommended in the 1100 page Lonely Planet South America on a Shoestring guide. Probably 90% of gringo travelers haul this tome around with them down here, hanging onto every word of it, then cursing it for its numerous egregious errors and omissions. We were a part of that gringo 90% and it seems we might soon account for more than 75% of the net total cursing.

On Lonely Planetīs recommendation, Laura had called one of the managers/owners of Isla de Baņos, a German expat named Christian, to inquire as to horse riding excursions. He supposedly organized the best tours in Baņos. Not expecting to become violently nauseous on the bus, Laura had signed up for an outing beginning that same day, Wednesday, at 10:30 AM (I didnīt sign up, wanting to soak in the hot springs instead). There was now no way that this was going to happen. Lauraīs first order of business at roughly 8:05 AM was to promptly find Christian at Isla de Baņos to apologize and let him know she could not possibly make the tour. It sounds like common sense, yes, but it was quite possible to simply fail to show up at Isla de Baņos. No deposit had been requested or made. Unfortunately, responsible action was met with uncharitable apathy.

A slight, blonde haired man with a neatly trimmed beard, somewhere in his mid-40s, Christian stared down at Laura from across the counter at Isla de Baņos. They spoke in German. I could only understand one word in ten, but coupled with his tone of voice and expressions, it was enough to form a very accurate understanding of the exchange. "This isnīt good," Christian had said. "Its difficult to cancel this, very difficult." He was utterly unsypathetic to Lauraīs illness. It was as if he assumed she were lying about running a fever and spending the last four hours throwing up on a bus. Finally, he shrugged, gave us the keys to our room and let us go --- so much for insurmountable difficulties. He seemed oblivious to the fact that we were still giving him business by staying in his hostal for several nights rather than in one of the many other cheaper places in town.

That wasnīt the end of it. When we saw him the next day, he explained that he would have to charge Laura an extra $5 on the bill. Not a large sum, but something he had neglected to mention before and, precisely because it was such a small sum, it seemed a petty thing to bother with. A bit capricious and random, as well, as though it had suddenly occured to him that he could fidget with our bills if he felt like it. When Laura told him that the two of us were considering going riding on the following day (Friday, Dec. 3) he offered to waive the charge, provided we did indeed sign up.

On Friday morning, before our riding in the mountains, we told Christian that our plan was to go on the excursion, spend a few hours after that in Baņos, and then catch an 8-hour overnight bus to Cuenca. Could we leave our things at the hostal while we rode and pick them um before we left? Yes. Could we use the showers when we came back from riding? "You must pay $2 each," he told us. Cheap. Very cheap. We were paying $35 each for the riding, and Baņos was brimming with other tour operators selling riding excursions for less.

Later in the afternoon, following our return from riding, we saw a fluffy white cat curled up on a window sill in the lobby. Christian wasnīt around. We pet the cat. It purred. It turned on its back to allow to scratch its belly. I looked around for Christian all of a sudden, a bit nervous.

"If he sees us, heīs going to charge us $2 each for petting the cat," I told Laura.

In the end, we settled our final bill with one of the other receptionists at Isla de Balos. Christian wasnīt around at the time. When we received the check, we noticed that our breakfast hadnīt been added to the tab --- clearly an uncharacteristic oversight rather than an act of generosity. At any other place I had stayed at, I would have pointed this out and paid immediately. But in this case, neither one of us bothered, repaying pettiness with pettiness of our own. We came out a tawdry $5 ahead on the deal at the end of the day, which felt like a big moral victory (we never did use the showers there, since the entry fee to the hot springs themselves at Baņos is only $1.10 and there are showers on the premises). I suspect that Christian is probably trying to hunt us down across South America to collect the difference, all while busily calculating compound interest on the sum every 6 hours, according to the Prime Rate in Luxembourg.

Baņos and its Baņos

Its Major Pet Peeve Time: I have always the hated the expression that a certain aesthetically pleasing place "looks just like a postcard," or that it is "postcard perfect," because, lets face it, postcards are crappy little pieces of thin cardboard paper with pictures on them. The real thing, on the other hand, is the Real Thing. Better to compliment a postcard along the lines of "wow! that postcard picture of Bartalome in the Galapagos perfectly captures the way the real place looks" than to go to Bartalome and be the moron in the "I Love Boobies" T-shirt scratching his ass and saying "golly! looks just like a postcard." Oh really? Well then why did you spend $2,000 to come here?

But I digress like a bitter old man, which, of course, I have never done before.

I mention all this because, after the Galapagos, Baņos could well be the postcard capital of Ecuador. Its tidy, small and well organized with carefully tended parks, narrow streets and beautiful buildings in yellow, green, red and sky blue. All around the town, densely forested mountains rise thousands of feet into fog and cloud. An 18,000 foot volcano towers about Baņos, threatening to destroy the town within minutes. (Residents were evacuated in 1999 amid persistent rumblings and indications that a catastrophe was imminent. Nothing of the sort happened, however, and people eventually crept back home, despite government roadblocks and continued warnings.)

With Laura recuperating in bed, I spent Wednesday afternoon wandering aimless about, drinking coffee and reading in the many parks and small Bohemian cafes (many run by a friendlier variety of expat than Christian). Early that evening, I went to the baths. Soreness from horse riding was setting in and the various cuts, bruises and scrapes picked up in the rainforest were starting to make themselves noticed. I think I still had spines from a dead caterpillar lodged somewhere in my foot.

There are two main bathing facilities in Baņos but one is fairly remote and a bus is recommended to get there. I went to the more popular complex, set directly under a waterfall that pour down hundreds of feet from one of the many tall mountains looming directly over the town in a ring. It was relatively crowded for an early Wednesday evening, mainly with Ecuadorians rather than gringos. There were only a few pools, exposed to the cool open night air. Two of them were steaming hot, one was very nearly scalding, and the other pool was nearly freezing. People would move back and forth from the cold pool to the hotter pools and, eventually, remove themselves from the hot pools and just sit on the edges with their feet in the water. I found that after 20 minutes in the hot pools, this was a necessity to cool down. After an hour and a half of dipping in and out while reading a book and avoiding the splashings about of sugar-high children, I had had enough. Some people spend a full day in these baths, but I question how they have any skin left on their bodies after doing this. The baths I had visited at Papallacta (during my time mountain biking in the area), on the other hand, were larger and in a nicer complex. There were more pools there, giving a wider variety of temperature. I could have spent quite a long time in some of those.

Horse Riding

On our last day in Baņos, before hopping a night bus to Cuenca, Laura and I went riding on a tour organized by our good friend Christian. Christian did not lead the tour, however. Instead we had a friendly but somewhat unbalanced local guide who relished riding behind us and beating our horses on the rear with a stick, screaming "Yah!" to get them to speed up. He usually did this precisely while we were trying to slow the horses down.

My horse was a large, red male named "Duque" (Duke). I think he must have been the equine duke of flatulence, however. Ascents and descents of any degree whatsoever irritated something that was not-quite-right in Duqueīs horsie bowels and a stream of intestinal percussive music followed. This lasted throughout the 5-hour trip. Duque was also rather lazy, as I would expect any horse having an acute gas problem to be, and it took a lot of work to get him going. Lauraīs horse, on the other hand, was insane, and would prance erratically backwards and sideways, wild-eyed, each time she pulled on the reins to slow her down. The fact that the guide continuously shouted at the horse, calling it "Loca!" rather than the name he had initially referred to it by, gives a fairly good indication of its character.

Regardless of our experiences with the horses, we had a good ride overlooking Baņos and mile after mile of the surrounding valleys and farmlands, all from an elevation several thousand feet above the town. We also had a clear look at menacing Volcan Tungurahua, though it was only clear for a few moments, as fog and clouds continuously rolled by its summit.

After the ride, we went to the baths, recovered our belongings and stiffed Christian the $5 breakfast sum. At 11:00 we began our trip to Cuenca.

Posted by Joshua on December 3, 2004 12:33 PM
Category: Ecuador
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