Banos – backpacker hangout with some treats

On the way to Banos, we passed the small town of Pelileo. Sorry this will be an “insider” as opener: There is no tourist sites here. Nothing like that, but then what’s special about it? @IC community of our readers: Pelileo is the home town of Victoria *smiley winking*

Banos itself is a very touristy city, both for Ecuadorian tourists and gringos. We took the first day easy to organize some things, e.g. doing our laundry and drink some fresh lemonade and juice…

In Banos, you can find everything. Pimped cars, good restaurants, and not so well maintained bridges… We were not sure if we should take it, but there were horse drops around. Horses are heavier than we are, so…to keep it short, we made it and the bridge didn’t break!

On the second day (our first really active day in Banos), we got some bikes to drive to Puyo. This is 61km from Banos, descending from 1800m to 950m. What a ride! Sounds easy…

We passed very nice waterfalls, saw much interesting wildlife, again semi-solid bridges and discovered, that there are some really serious hills to climb in between *smiley worried*

Overall it was very interesting how the vegetation changed with the lower altitude. The leaves were getting much bigger (at least 4-times in size) and we got already some kind of jungle feeling.

With hurting legs, we were just in front of Shell on a now smoothly descending road just 8 or 9 km before Puyo. Suddenly the sky released several litres of water per minute and square meter… After not even two minutes, I was completely wet. Completely means completely *smiley annoyed* Everything! We skipped the rest of the road and instead stopped the next bus passing back to Banos.

In the evening, we decided, that we need something really good to eat, so we went to the Swiss Bistro.

The next day, we were climbing up several hundred meters to the Mirador Volcan to see Tungurahua, a still active volcano. We had beautiful views down to Banos, nice flowers on the way and especially the one of us with sneakers had some difficulties to climb up as quite some part of the way was washed away by heavy rain…

I even saw my first real colibri in nature!!! Green, small, and fast. There are no pics, sorry, I was too slow because I was just busy to rescue Thorsten out of a mud hole

Finally, we have been up at the mirador, and guess what, we did not see the volcano but a lot of clouds…

In the evening we had a beer and then went to a steakhouse where we took a plate with everything (which was basically the amount of meat we normally eat in two weeks…*smiley winking*

Later on some reading… and as we stayed at a 7 Dollar Hostel, there where no reading lights at the bed

On our last day in the city, we got up early in the morning to go to one of the “banos” in Banos with water of the hot volcanic springs. Beware: Hot really means hot!

Comment from Thorsten: Male humans should really be warned before entering it! *smiley winking*

We are now on our way to catch a train running along the Devils Nose.

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