Baños (hasta Puyo)

This weekend, I went with a friend to Baños. Unfortunately, my camera decided to reject the memory card so there aren’t many photos. However, I did manage to do several fun things while there!

First, I went puenting. Puenting is basically jumping off of a bridge on a cable of about 70m into a canyon and swinging. There is no bungee, nor is there a safety waiver. Basically, you pay $20 and get harnessed up and proceed to jump off a small platform. For me, the conversation on the platform went (in Spanish):

                “Are you ready?”

                “No.”

                “Okay, 1, wait, no?”

                “Yes I’m ready just count.”

                “1, 2, 3!”

All went well (as you can see below). To get me back to solid ground, they lowered the rope from the bridge slowly so that a kid with another rope could throw that to you to reel you back in. And, like any good college student, I encouraged my travel buddy to also jump off the bridge.

After puenting, we went up the river a bit and found a ziplining place. The first zipline hurls you about 800m across the river and into a little gorge, and there’s significant doubt at any point that you will be able to stop before you hit the stone wall. Luckily, again, everything worked just fine. From there, we had to take a cable bridge (which is tiny and you can see through it and it moves a lot) across a small part of the gorge. Then, we used the clips to attach ourselves to another cable and climb the wire steps up the rock wall to get to the next line. As we were climbing, one of the little rocks fell on my head (I had a helmet, don’t worry), so I basically decided that I should just get moving and off that rock face. Then we took the final short zipline back across the river. From there, we walked back into town.

Given that the original reason for going to Baños was to do a bike ride to Puyo, we decided to embark on that adventure on Sunday morning. We rented bikes for $5 each, with helmets and a repair kit. The ride is about 57km, which ends up being around 35 miles. Although the trip is mostly downhill, there are some brief inclines that made me question my decision to participate. We’d heard that the trip would take between 5 and 8 hours depending on the length of stops along the way. Apparently, we weren’t stopping a lot, because we finished the ride in 4 hours. That being said, 4 hours in the sun at the equator, having forgotten to apply sunscreen to my arms and legs, means that I have a solid burn, but it was completely worth it.