With this ‘exercise thing’ we seemed to have going – horse riding, volcano climbing and waterfall trekking, we figured “why stop now?” So, with our muscles in agony from lack of serious exercise until now, we returned to Banos in a private taxi (woo hoo!) with a driver who had no idea where he was going (booooo) for canyoning, biking and hiking galore (we had spent the weekend here during our time at Santa Martha).
Banos from above – the view from the Virgin on the hill
Banos is awesome – a smallish, entirely touristy town with good restaurants, bars (if you’re karaoke keen) and Ecuador’s best tattoo artist (no I didn’t get one, but a friend did and I’m jealous). Nestled away in the bottom of a valley (dangerous position considering it’s vicinity to a volcano that erupted in 2006 and was puffing out smoke in October 2008), it comes complete with hundreds of tour operators which fill the streets and harass you for your business as you walk past. They are almost as bad as the ones at bus stations: “QUITO, QUITO, QUITO, QUITO” they yell as you walk by; except in Banos it’s “CANOYING, RAFTING, MOTOS; CANOYONING RAFTING, MOTOS.” Times this by the 20 tour operators that line the street your perusing and you get a rather musical (though annoying) tune in a round. One guy didn’t think this ‘tune’ was enough. Instead, he tried to get my business by shoving a fake rat in my face. It definitely got my attention, needless to say I kept walking.
The local church – painting hanging on the walls inside
depict bizarre stories of people being saved by Santa Maria, including tourists that drove off cliff landing on
rocks 200m below and surviving. Hmmmm.
After a day recouping our energy we hired ‘cool’ push bikes, as one jealous American tourist remarked; $6 for the entire day. He had some dodgy looking red one. Ours were blue, white and yellow and new looking – very chic. The amount he went on about them made us concerned that our bikes might mysteriously disappear along the trail, and we would (unsurprisingly) be left with red ones. We deterred him from stealing them by voicing our concerns to him about our breaks – they couldn’t have been new as our breaks were crapholio. Squeaky as hell, and they hardly worked. Really handy when 90% of the road was downhill.
Anyhoo, with map in one hand and brakes squeezed tightly in the other we headed off down the 60km road to Puyo where you can find waterfalls every 5 or so kilometres. Little did we know that it was the main road to Puyo. Every few minutes you would have a burst of cars rushing past you, honking as they go for you to move over. There was so much to concentrate on – hill, crappy brakes, not falling into the gutter, not being hit by a car, trying not to brake hard on the loose gravel, where is the waterfall entry?, praying your chain won’t come off when you change gears (as Claire experienced), that I spent the whole time looking down and missing the beautiful view. Luckily we stopped at every waterfall for the 30 or so kilometres that we travelled.
Ecuadorians seem to be generally good with bike riders though. They give you such a wide berth, so much so that were often driving on the other side to go around us, even though we were pretty much riding in the gutter. I do wonder whether this is courtesy or just the way they drive - our bus drivers often take to the other side of the road when they take a corner too fast or just simply cruise in the middle of the road so they can go faster – more room for error. I hope it’s the former. Either way, they are definitely not like Australian drivers, that for some reason feel they should experiment with how close they can get to a bike rider before causing them to fall off.
We rode through this. Choke.
The waterfalls were beautiful. Some even had fun ways of getting to them, like cable cars that felt like (and probably were) free falling to the bottom of the line.
WEEEEEEEEEE!!!
For others, you had to trek for kilometres downhill from the road through the jungle to find it (and then you had to trek back up, NOT HAPPY JAN!)
The trek back up.
You could walk right up to them, and stand underneath if you felt like a shower. I was dumb and did this on the first one, not thinking about the fact that I had to cycle for the rest of the day. Note to self: being saturated + wind from speeding down a hill at 30km an hour = freezing your butt off. Although on the plus side, it meant I didn’t get so hot when we had a hill climb, though my legs still instantly turned to jelly as soon as I saw it.
Soaked.
While we’d planned to make it the 60kms to Puyo, after a solid 5 hours of touring, jelly legs, rain clouds and darkness setting in, we thought it best to cut our journey short.
So, we cheated. We caught the truck back up the hill with the 20 or so other people that had given up by that point. Somehow, we all squeezed in, the truck literally billowing with people and bikes for the 30 minute journey home. An added bonus: Claire and I managed to score the front seats with everyone else sitting in the tray with the bikes, much to our bums relief.
Piling the bikes up
No comments:
Post a Comment