Day 5: Bathing and More Bussing

At quarter to 7 in the morning, no tourists could be found, but the town was quietly bustling under the looming mountains with their gathered clouds. Uniformed school children were walking everywhere, a taxi driver helped an old woman load a bag of onions larger than she was into his trunk, a curly-haired white poodle followed a woman in a bright pink sweatshirt as she unlocked her shop. I padded to the market, where I bought chard, cilantro, avocados, a dragon fruit, tiny bananas, a lime, and inadvertently 2 mandarins. All this produce cost me $2.25 (yes, Ecuador uses the American dollar). When I went to the lady selling the small bananas, they were 10 cents. I had a quarter. I handed her my quarter and she looked at my forlornly. Too early in the morning to have change. Handing someone a five dollar bill in the middle of the day will garner the same dispirited look, and then they have to trot off to their neighbor, or the cash stash in their lorry parked nearby, to break your huge $5 bill. Mrs Banana's neighbors didn't have any change either. She tried to sell me a more expensive mango to fix the problem, but that would have only aggravated it because the next up I had was that humungous fiver. After some charades and negotiating, we settled on her giving me two mandarins and keeping the quarter and we were all happy. 

Back at the hostel kitchen I crafted guacamole for me and my traveling companions. I love making food here, all this delicious cheap produce, and I can wash it myself in safe water and feel better about the prognosis of eating raw veggies in a tropical country with all the maladies. 

Baños is called such not because of "bathroom" but because it has hot springs! (Baños is bath). The shirts in the tourists shops say "I 💜 Baños", which, if someone doesn't know towns in Ecuador will make the wearer appear to have a strong affinity for toilets. 

So off we trekked into the crook of the mountain to get some soaking time. The water was the color of broken pipe outflow and smiled vaguely of eggs. Bathers of all ages gathered, especially older locals it seemed, and one could dunk in a number of pools of different temperatures, including a chilly one to make the skin truly vibrate. It felt wonderful to rest in perfectly warm water and gaze up at big leaves, with my legs all rickety and wacked from so much walking upwards. After an hour of resting in the mineral pools, I was surprisingly not pruney, and I felt like a stewed chicken, that my flesh would just meltingly peel of my bones. 

 

One of the many baths in Baños.

 

After making ourselves all floppy and lala in the baths, it was time to move onwards out of Baños and closer to the rainforest. Unlike the states, where you'd be lucky to find two buses a day between large towns, and basically unable to bus between small towns, in Ecuador, buses move between towns all day every day. We wanted to Puyo, further down out of the mountains, and stopped by last night to the terminal so we could plan our day around the bus if needed. We found about 8 different companies, and they all had multiple trips to Puyo during the day. We didn't even buy tickets in advance, just showed up and found whichever company was leaving next. So I'm not flexing quads on the bicycle but I am becoming an expert on buses now I guess. 

All packed up and ready to bus! I used to play "towel on the end of a stick traveler" when I was a kid.

Onboard, the bus dieseled along, carving down the curvy hill-hugging road like a ship on the high seas. I dried my swim suit in the wind as empty plastic drink bottles rolled back and forth across the floor with the keeling of the bus. The roadside vegetation got progressively more crowded and stacked as we barreled down in elevation towards the oriente. I felt glad I wasn't a cyclist sharing this road with this bus. 

I was paying attention: there were palm trees and flowering things and even grassy weeds that weren't growing up in Baños. I don't know why, but I just relish seeing who lives where. Bigger leaves here I come!