October 3 - Banos and Ultimate Creek Hikes

As a celebration for completing the TESOL course the Language Corp group went to Baños. We left Friday evening, took a 4 hour bus, and arrived at like 10:00. Since we arrived so late and we were all exhausted we just went to bed. But on Saturday we went on a little adventure.

To preface this story I have to say I love creek hikes. That is one of the reasons why I wanted to be nature director at camp. I also love swimming. Baños has lots of creeks, and we decided to go sort of an ultimate creek hike. The “ultimate” part was because the creek was located on the mountain side and had many waterfalls. Some of these falls we could just jump down. They weren’t as high as the ones in Mindo, and so when I landed on my butt, I was fine. Like I said, we were able to jump down some of the waterfalls. As for the rest, we had to rappel down them. It was soooooo sweet. Unfortunately because of the water nobody brought their cameras……except for the guide, who put all the pictures on C.D. Jenny has those pictures now, but I should have them in a week or so.

After the creek hike I went for a walk around the town to see what it was all about. Apparently Baños is famous for taffy. There were stores everywhere, and each one had some one pulling the taffy outside and offering free samples. I of course took advantage of this and gorged myself on taffy, then bought about a pound of taffy that I’m pretty sure I’ll never eat. But its ok it was only 75 cents.

The rest of the group went out to experience the night life of Baños after dinner, but I stayed in and read a book ( I know, boring, but it was a good book).

The next morning we all went on a hike to see this really awesome waterfall, but on the way we took a detour so that Phillip could bungee jump off a bridge. I wanted to, but chickened out. Maybe on my next trip. The hike that we went on was pretty short but it was down a really steep hill. The waterfall was amazing. We got to get really close to it by crawling through this semi cave type thing. It was a really small crawlway and I’m pretty sure it was only so small because Ecuadorians are so small. It was a little spooking, but pretty exciting.