So yes, we are in Banos. You'll want to hear about how we got here. It started with about a 30 minute cab ride to the main bus station in the south of Quito. That cost about $11, which is a lot for around here, but pretty good for how long of a ride it was. We then bought bus tickets for the 3.5 hour journey south to Banos for $3.50 each! Now we're talking. We were assured that this bus would be "direct", but I guess they use that term a little more loosely than we would. It's true that we never technically had to change buses before arriving in Banos, but it certainly didn't go directly there. It was about a quarter full when we left the station, and I'd say we made about 25 stops along the way to pick people up whenever and wherever somebody wanted to get on. They run a two-man team, with a driver and a "door guy" (as I call him), who hangs out the door yelling "BANOS! BANOS!", or wherever the bus is heading, then comes around to collect money from whoever got on. It's an old coach bus, so fairly comfortable seats, but they'll pick up as many people as possible and have the entire aisle lined with people standing if they can. Not only that, but there are constantly vendors getting on and off trying to sell any kind of snack or drink you could want. Some of them even have little companies with matching uniforms that will bombard the bus with a conga line of snacks - ice cream, yogurt, water, coke, oranges, apples, chips, candy, plus all kinds of weird little snacks that they enjoy around here. At one stop a company wearing baby blue uniforms had a rotation of about 12-15 different vendors get on the bus 3 at a time, ride for a minute as they try to sell their goods, then get off for the next group. It was so strange. The only thing we have bought are ice cream cones for 25 cents - and they were pretty good! (except for the weird raisin-like fruit in my ice cream) If you've never ridden a local bus in Ecuador, it's worth experiencing, if only once... What should be a 3-hour trip was more like 4 hours in the circus that was our bus, but we eventually made it.
The hostel we are staying at here is amazing. It's an Aussie-Kiwi couple that own and run the place. It's easily the nicest hostel we've stayed at and the breakfasts are great. Normally around here if you got anything more than coffee/tea with bread and jam you'd be happy, but they also have muesli, juice, fresh fruit, and lots of options for the fresh baked bread. The Australian owner even smuggles in Vegemite, but of course we won't touch that stuff. We've had a good time talking Aussie-Kiwi relations with them, which we really enjoyed following while in New Zealand. Banos is a pretty nice town as well, at least by local standards. It's touristy, with heaps of little souvenir and trinket shops, and is mostly known for it's outdoor activities. There is mountain biking, canyoning, rafting, bungee jumping, and guided trips to nearby mountains, volcanos, and rainforests. If I'm not being too harsh, it's kind of the third-world version of Queenstown. Being touristy, there's lots of good restaurants for pretty good prices. For $5 you can get a huge plate of food plus a coke for an extra buck.
One of the more popular things to do in Banos is a bike ride toward the town of Puyo, which is about 60 kilometers away. You don't actually have to go that far, and it's supposed to be a scenic, mostly downhill, ride. We were slightly interested, then we heard that bike rentals are only like $5 and we were in. I was a little ticked when we showed up and the bikes were $10 or $7, but the guy read our minds and showed us the $4 bike rack. Now there's a deal. For $4 each we got a decent mountain bike for the day, helmets, a repair kit and chain with lock. The ride toward Puyo can be charcterized in two different ways - about 3/4ths of what we did were on a narrow, 2-lane road with cars and huge trucks and buses zooming past you. I will say that they were pretty good about giving you a lot of room and waiting for traffic to clear before passing you, but it was still very nerve-racking nonetheless. The other 1/4th of the trip was along these bypasses of tunnels where you had a one-lane road with no traffic. You could breathe fresh air, hear the birds, stop for pictures...these parts were really nice and made the whole trip worth it. Most of the ride is downhill, through this gorge with a river down below you. There's a bunch of waterfalls along the way that you can stop and look at. Many of them you can see from the road across the gorge. Pretty much all of these had a little restaurant at the lookout where you can get in a cable car and ride across the gorge. We stopped at the first one we saw and, thinking this sounded pretty cool, gladly paid a $1.50 each to ride across the gorge and back. We didn't know until later that every waterfall would have this and the other one's only charged a dollar. Can't fault the first place for charging $1.50, that's just good business. Some of the waterfalls you had to hike to, and while we couldn't quite figure it out, it appeared that people wanted you to pay to walk down a trail to see the waterfall. It was only a dollar or 2, but why should we have to pay to see a waterfall? We skipped most of these and just kept on biking. We were feeling pretty good until we actually had to pedal up a hill, and not long after that we decided we'd had enough and stopped. For a dollar we hopped onto a bus back with a bunch of weary travelers on their "direct" route to Banos...
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