Where Banos Gets It's Name

Earlier I mentioned that Banos (with a little ~ over the 'n') is a term for "bathroom" in Spanish. That part is true. The town of Banos, however, its actually named from the literal translation of 'banos' being 'bath.' Actually the town's official name is Banos de Agua Santa which I think means "bath of the holy water." Anyways, the town is known for it's hydrothermal springs near town. Jeez, what am I getting at? Nothing really, except to say that we did visit a little spa yesterday where instead of soaking in hot pools we went for an Ecuadorian specialty - Banos de Cajon, or as I like to call it "the steam coffin." I had no idea what I was getting into, only that you sit in a little box, that it costs 7 dollars and would hopefully prevent Steph from getting a $35 massage. Turns out all of that was right, and much more. First you strip down to a bathing suit and they put you into your own little box with just your head sticking out. I wish we had taken the camera, but it looks a whole lot like this...

It's actually quite nice, even if a little uncomfortable. There is a lever inside where you control the amount of steam that enters your box, and there are some herbs inside there that smell nice and I suppose are good for your skin. Anyways, we're just sitting there relaxing, occasionally getting the guys working there to  get the big mug of tea sitting next to our head and direct the straw into our mouth for a drink. That was a bit awkward, but okay. I was relaxed and enjoying the view out the window, while wondering what these little baths of water in front of us was for. I figured it must be the water that they use for the steam. No idea why you would have a bath of it instead of just pipe it right in, but whatever. After about 15 minutes of relaxation, the guy comes and opens the door to your box, turns around and gets a big bucket of water from the bath in front of us, and proceeds to poor this impossibly cold water all over us! I did not expect that.  Steph was almost screaming and begging them to stop, but they were pretty adamant that everyone had to be doused a couple times with the freezing water. More refreshed than we ever wanted to be, they eventually closed the doors back and we cranked up the steam to warm ourselves up as quickly as possible. Another 15 minutes later and the same thing, except this time they changed it up a bit and made us sit down in the little bath of cold water, then took a pitcher and dumped water over our heads a couple times, then told us to continue dumping the water on ourselves. They stood there and watched to make sure you did it, but Steph would just pretend to pour it over her head but would really just pour it on her ponytail. They bought it, and once we stopped steaming let us back into our boxes. I was beginning to think they were steam coffins after all...

So again we steamed and again they doused us with cold water, this time making us stand in front of the baths and dousing us from behind.

No idea why they had a different method of freezing you out every time. By this time it appeared they had called in every worker in the place to watch and laugh at Steph's reactions to the cold water. It was hilarious. She would scream and dance around and have to fight her hands from instinctively pushing the bucket away. After one final steam and a spray down with a hose, we were finally invited to take a cold shower. Huh? We'll pass. I know I'm making this sound awful but it actually made you feel great, plus was really funny. They finished us off with a mud mask for our faces and a half a pineapple. What an amazing deal for 7 bucks! You wouldn't want to do it every day, but maybe once or twice a month when you need a good steam and a good laugh.

We've liked our stay in Banos so much that we are staying an extra night, even if all we've done is sit around all day. It has been raining off and on, so that's our excuse to do nothing. There is a lot of planning to be done, so it's been good to get a lot of that taken care of. Plus, we are probably delaying the 8 hour bus ride we have to take tomorrow to get out to the coast. Good beaches and whale watching await us, so it should be worth it.

One of the things I've worked on today is a map of where we've been and are going. The best I could come up with is Google Maps, but if anybody knows a more specialized website for this I'd be happy to hear it. As it stands, I've put in all our major airports into the map and drawn a line to show the order in which we visit them. Then I'm putting little "pins" on the places outside the main cities that we have visited (red pins) and will visit (green pens). That way, if you want to know where the heck Banos, Ecuador is, you can go to this map and click on the pins or on the list on the left to find Banos! Productive day! I'll put a permanent link on the right column of the blog that you can use to get to the map and will try my best to update it as we go along. So, for example, the map below is a screen shot of Ecuador, with the plane symbol being Quito, the red pin being Banos, and the green pins being Guayaquil (where we stay tomorrow night) and Puerto Lopez (where we'll end up the next day). The red line is our flight from Lima to Quito and the green line is our upcoming flight from Quito to Santiago, Chile.