Baños (the town, not the porcelain palace) 8/14/12 - 8/17/12

Getting from Salinas to Baños did not take long at all, only about 4 hours and $5 each.  Once we arrived, we quickly saw how touristy the town was.  Not that it was a bad thing, but the amount of activities to choose from was a little overwhelming.  We compared it to San Gil, Colombia.  Baños offered most of the same activities: rafting, horseback riding, biking, etc.  Another plus of a tourist town is the plethora of great food.  We've learned you have to get it while you can.

Within the first hour, we ran into a friend, Tom, that we previously met in Colombia.  We had lunch with him and he told us that he and his friend found a bridge that the town uses to jump off of.  Long story short, Matt wanted to jump with them the next day, and Kristin wanted to go as well.  Thus, the following day we went to the San Francisco Bridge (roughly 100 meters high), let the adrenaline flow, put away rationale for a few minutes, and each jumped off.  You jump, free fall for about 3 seconds, and then swing back and forth while seeing amazing views of the river below.  BEST part of the trip so far!!

To see videos of our jumps click on the "Picture Albums" category on the right side of this page, then once on the Flickr webpage click the Ecuador album, then Banos, and our videos are there!

That was the highlight for us of Baños, and the other days we kind of took it easy.  We hiked up to another mirador (Latin America loves their outlooks) and also went on a go-kart adventure that was cut short due to a starting cable dis-connect.  This lead to us leaving the kart on the side of the road and jumping in our friend, Ricky's, kart.  We rode 3 people in the go-kart for about 20 mins back to town and got some funny looks and laughs from the locals along the way.  

Our last day, we did a 1 km long zip line over a river, superman style.  Once again, some more great views!  That evening we left on a night bus heading 14 hours west to Ecuador's coast.  

While in Banos we stayed at La Chimenea Hostel.  It was very clean, nice, comfortable, had a private bath, HOT water, and had an amazing view of a waterfall from our balcony.  Only $8.50 each.