QUIET DAYS IN BAÑOS, LIVING WITH THE VOLCANO
Baños, Ecuador, Wednesday, June 21, 2006

We arrived here last Friday. Since then the sun has made only very brief appearances, and rain showers have not been uncommon. If from our quarters at Hostal Santa Cruz you walk through the town to just past the bus terminal, you come to a new-looking two-lane bridge – it is in fact an emergency bridge in case there is an eruption of the Tungarahua volcano – you can apparently see the volcano above the town from about halfway across. This assumes that the skies are clear. They have not been. The bridge crosses a really steep and deep gorge with an Andean river roaring down it and one bridal-veil waterfall after another pouring into it from above.

Kathleen and Antonia took a local bus to Agua Verde to visit Pailon de Diablo, one of the most beautiful waterfalls. You can walk right beside the waterfall with the mist blowing in your face and there is a tropical botanical garden, a suspension bridge and a cable car as well. Visiting it involved a one-kilometre climb down and back up to the bus but they report that it was well worth it.

I decided not to go since I had been laid low by traveler’s diarrhea and was not inclined to get very far from the hotel’s facilities. Since natural remedies have not worked well, I finally went to a farmacia and got something to deal with it. William just decided he wanted to loaf around the hotel and watch World Cup football matches.

The common room at Santa Cruz was packed for the Ecuador-Germany game with everyone except a young German named Florian from Dinkelsbuehl and me rooting for Ecuador. “There was no joy in Mudville” when Germany won 3-0. I cannot imagine the “joy” if Ecuador had actually won! They saw Germany as their main challenge. Nevertheless, both teams are advancing to the next level so, in a way, the game was a little pointless.

Living on a volcano

Baños lives literally on a volcano. Tungarahua is active and there is a constant threat of eruption. In fact, several times in recent years, the whole town has been evacuated, one time for three months. The townspeople were more than a little miffed when there was no eruption and, upon returning, found that many of their houses and businesses had been burgled.

The peak was first ascended by three German climbers at the turn of the 19th to the 20th Century. A few years later it was scaled again and it was already quite a bit higher. As a tourist you cannot actually get up to the crater: it would not be advisable anyway since the gasses are poisonous and there is a lot of volcanic ash. We are on the cusp of the dry season so perhaps there is chance to see Tungarahua later in the summer. At present it is pretty dodgy.

This does nothing to inhibit the touting of evening trips to the “eruption “. For three or four dollars a head, you are driven up to Bellavista, where we climbed earlier in our stay. If it’s clear should have a great night-view. But so far every night has been cloudy and not seldom rainy.

Baños is a real tourist town. The streets are lined with restaurants and hotels and tour operators. You can ride horses to see the glacier or even undertake 2-4 day trips. There is river rafting and “canyoning” (i.e. rapelling down cliff faces), bungee jumping from bridges or hiking tours up the mountains. There are lots of noisy 4-wheelers and mud bikes to be rented. For the less athletically inclined, there are the thermal baths and, of course, one could also attend one of the many daily masses for pilgrims at the Iglesia de la Virgen de Agua Santa. These seem to be well attended so I guess the Roman Catholic Church is still going strong in Ecuador.

We check each day to see if we are getting any work but so far nothing. We plan, if the state of my lower intestines permits, to bus it to Quito today, Wednesday, and then catch another bus to Otavalo. Not only is there the famous weekly textile market on Saturday, but there is also this week the festival of San Juan Buatista (St. John the Baptist), an important indigenous event. It’s either that or an indigenous festival in nearby Cotacachi. We have decided to travel up there today to make sure we can get accommodation.

TRAVELLING TO OTAVALO
Otavalo, Ecuador, Thursday, June 22, 2006

We get a slow start for our departure from Baños. I am still weak from my three-day bout of traveler’s diarrhea, the skies remain overcast, there a World-Cup game on between Mexico and Portugal that keeps us sitting by the open fire burning in the common room at Hostal Santa Cruz. Finally, we get our bags packed and, after Kathleen has made a trip to the ATM, the bill settled and we trudge off through the town to the bus depot.

There it is the usual noisy scene of barkers hawking their bus line. Quite experienced now, we select the next bus heading towards Quito, buy our tickets, watch while the dour conductor puts our baggage into the compartment under the bus and we climb on board. There are lots of seats and we spread out, but suspect that the bus will fill up along the route. They always seem to.

As the bus pulls out of the station and starts its grind up the hill to the bridge across the gorge, as it then starts the first of its long grind up the 1,000 metres to Quito some three hours away, I squirm in my seat to see if I can catch a glimpse of Tungarahua. Nope. No dice. It shall remain a mystery to us until we return. We notice along the way that the really big peaks attract clouds, the active volcanoes perhaps even more so, whereas, in between large peaks, we get sunshine. There is definitely a rainshadow around these mountains. This however does nothing to hinder the view lower down across the wide Avenida de Volcanos. The valleys at first are more narrow and very, very deep. Later, after Ambato, we are up quite high already and the valleys are much broader. Unlike the Rockies, however, which are wild and contain nearly no cities at all (the cities are either on the coast or on the high prairie), here there are settlements everywhere and there are fields and meadows from the valley floor to very high up the slopes.

There are lots of plastic-covered greenhouses too; at one point later in the day we come quite close to them and I can see that they are growing roses inside. Most of them have a sign outside advertising “Israeliriega”, which I come to realise is an Israeli system for computer-fine-tuning of irrigation. Ecuador is a major producer of roses, tulips and other cut flowers, the climate here producing some of the best in the world. The flowers are sent daily around the world and Ecuador even sells flowers in Holland. I am hoping to get a visit to one of these operations from my acquaintance in Quito, Mario. The Israeli system drip-feeds water to the flowers based upon a number of automated measurements.

The bus fills to overflowing, making frequent stops in remote places. We bunch together to give our seats to mothers or grandmothers with babies. Several older women board the bus with baskets or even metal pails. They are wearing the typical Andes fedora hat and a shawl pinned around their shoulders. Their features are strongly “indigenous”. The passengers are all quiet and well-behaved; there is no pushing or shoving despite the crowded conditions.

Eventually we reach the outskirts of Quito again and passengers start disembarking. A while later we see the Panecillo, the city’s guardian angel, and five minutes later we are back at the main terminal. There is some holdup at the security gates getting in, and the conductor tosses the remaining passengers off amongst the lined-up busses and the exhaust fumes. We march in through the bus gate and no one stops us.

We are at the third-floor level of the terminal. This and the one below seem to be filled with little restaurants and cafes. After a brief discussion amongst ourselves, we decide to have a quiet almuerzos before finding a bus to Otavalo. We pick the first likely one and receive the best-tasting, the best-looking, the largest and the cheapest three-course lunch we have had to date. $1.20 each. William had been thinking about hamburgers. But, as it says in our guidebook, you don’t come all this way to eat McDonalds. Even William is happy.

We spend another ten dollars to get us on an executive bus to Otavalo. It too fills up somewhat but it is never really full and we keep our individual seats for the two-hour ride. There is a lot of uphill driving and curving around mountain gorges again: this is Ecuador and the Andes after all. The TV screens are showing a dubbed American movie about an Orca taking revenge for some misdeed to his mate while outside the lowering sun warms the mountains and turns the huge puffy clouds into baroque paintings.

It is after dark before we arrive in Otavalo. The bus is going on an hour or so north to Tulcan on the border to Columbia and does not actually go into the terminal at Otavalo. We are let out with our baggage on the main bypass and the conductor points to the right and says, “Centro!”

It takes a little time to become oriented, not least because map-reading is difficult by street light. But there are lots of people around and the shops are still open. We pop into a computer parts store and get some directions to one or two cheap hostals. After one or two tries in small hotels that look very nice but charge $10 a night per person, we land at the Hostal Runa Pacha, not as nice but all right. Ecuadorian hotels charge by the person instead of by the room, which is the worst deal for everyone, it seems. The two guys at the desk, both with the long ponytails typical of this town, are asking $6 a night per person. We try to negotiate them down to $5 but they do not budge even when we tell them we shall stay five nights. However, when we say that it is too expensive and we shall look elsewhere, they say uno sono, “Cinco!” (“Five!”) We wind up with two rooms with baños privados.

Ecuadorian low-price hotels tend to have welded steel-frame bedsteads and terrible mattresses. Up till now the mattresses have been so hard that it was like sleeping on the ground or sleeping on Vilisar. Once or twice I was tempted to use the old Boy-Scout trick of scooping out hip and shoulder holes! This time the mattress is plenty soft and Kathleen and I both sink toward the middle during the night. The fitted sheet over the mattress comes off at all corners and by morning the bed looks like a major battle has been fought. The bathroom is as big as the bedroom and totally tiled. Like most hostals we have visited so far there are no towel racks and no soap dishes, even though, when you move in, they give you little packages of wrapped soap, towels and a roll of bog paper. But there is hot water and I am glad to have made it the whole way without a pit stop.