“There must be nothing so frustrating to doctors as patients taking their advice as loose suggestions. I’m likely guilty of stoking that irritation.” – Old Sean
Feliz Cumpleaños
My home base in Ecuador, Cuenca, has been amazingly dry during my long visits to the city. Though we get occasional drizzles, the air is somewhat arid and cool.
Which is a little ironic, considering that the entrance to the Amazon Rain Forest is a mere six hours away by car. The most notorious access point for the rain forest involves driving north, past the sheer windswept Andes Mountains of Southern Ecuador and into the lower but equally sheer behemoths that structure the thin pass into the rainforest.
The beginning of this entry point is called Baños . I’ve not been to the true Amazon Rainforest yet, but I’ve managed to traipse around the mountains that make up the outer rim on the West.
Since my birthday was over the weekend in mid-September, I joined a friend named Carolina for a quick jaunt into the green mountains. We managed to catch an overnight bus into Baños and staggered out of the vehicle, yawning and padding around.
The entire trip was an exercise in silence for me, since I had just removed my sixth wisdom tooth. Unfortunately, that meant I was effectively mute, cut off from English tirades and little, disjointed questions in Spanish. I was also unable to eat anything but soft mush foods that don’t tend to lodge themselves into mouth crannies, meaning my diet was basically yogurts, un-peppered mash potatoes ice creams and liquids. Waking up from a overnight bus ride to that kind of breakfast was a mild challenge in it’s own right.
Doctor’s Orders
Now, strictly speaking my Ecuadorian dentist warned me firmly that I needed two days of bed rest to recover, and avoid any strenuous activities that might make my heart rate rise and disturb the deep, barely healed clot in my mouth.
My last remaining wisdom tooth (most had been removed during a funny dream induced by sleeping gas when I was thirteen) was a long shard of a thin, extending all the way down to my skull roots, making removal easy but healing slow.
I would have simply kept it in, seeing as it wasn’t messing around my other dental fixtures, but being a little nub a quarter of the surface area of a regular tooth, it managed to get it’s very own cavity a mere four years after cropping up.
But I figured as long as I moved slow, kept my heart rate level and avoided any terribly hot water or showers, I would be fine. To be safe, I brought a fair chunk of medical supplies tailored towards mouth wholesomeness.
Wandering Baños
After a brief breakfast and walk around Baños (which is a nice little town, but nothing to write home about), we hopped on an “adventure bus” and started driving into the mountains.
Said “Adventure Bus” was an open air, wooden-seated vehicle painted an unholy mash up of primary colors with a thin roof doing nothing to stop the occasional rain coming in from an angle.
The edges of the vehicle were plastered with lines of LED lights blaring all sorts of colors and the enormous sound system mounted on the back thundered at a profane volume with Spanish music. Though Carolina and I were seated at the front and the speaker was mounted at the very back, I could feel the bass vibrating my seat even while the bus was in motion. I ended up wearing an earplug for the majority of the drive to avoid a mounting headache. Somehow, whenever the driver decided to provide tour information, the speakers would double down and blast his voice even louder than the music.
It’s a truly astonishing feat of infrastructural architecture that avalanches don’t occur in the Baños Mountains every time a tour bus rolls past.
Ridgeline Drives
The drive itself and surrounding scenery were inverse to thrum of our vehicle. Layers and layers of dark clouds whispered overhead, occasionally dipping below mountains, settling in valleys and peppering us with rain. Large, flat rivers nestled in said valleys, slowly crushing rounded boulders under white waters. Dense greenery, occasionally spewing thin lines of steam hugged the sides of mountains, even giving green tints to distant forms when clouds moved in to obscure the eyeline.
Best of all were the waterfalls, which appeared frequently in varying sizes. Distant ones were often artful white streams sundering a mountain in half. The smaller ones near our vehicle would occasionally hammer down on the road and our roof, cheerfully rushing towards the river below. All stones were slick with water and a deep grey, giving white-water a powerful relief to flow upon.
Since we were on a tour bus, we were granted many stops. Naturally, these many stops all had things to buy or chances to drop money on a further activity. I’ve never been a fan of tours for this reason, but at least the costs were fairly minimal.
Zip Line
Our first stop was, naturally, zip lining. Along a great, green gorge there existed a few sturdy cables launched across and firmly anchored on an adjacent, lower mountain. While the zip line itself wasn’t anything special, the crew tended to rig up the lines in a rather interesting way. Guests had the option to zip line facing forward on their bellies like Superman, or upside down like a bat under a semi-truck. Kids could actually ride their parent’s backs as they zoomed across. In a promotional video, a local dog (tail wagging) actually rode the back of a human across the gap (both harnessed securely, of course). There was also a swinging-death sphere, which would pendulum over the cliff edge, rolling wildly with a few people strapped inside.
I was fairly confident that zip-lining wouldn’t elevate my heard rate discernably, so I opted to give it a shot. However, hanging upside down with blood thundering into my skull wasn’t an option, so I ended up playing Superman for the duration.
On the other side, we meandered around the gorge waiting for the rest of our group until the bus pulled around with stragglers. Carolina and I checked out vistas and numerous sculptures of hummingbirds and other wildlife creatures until it was time to clamber back onto our day-glow audio-tank.
Cable Cars and Waterfalls
The next stop consisted of a series of cable cars tracing through the mountains, leading over and through a few waterfalls. There were ice cream parlors scattered about here and I restocked on edible fuel, letting my phone’s translation app manage my social life for me. There was another tiny art district here with carved owls, Native American feathered headdresses and heaps of tiny trinkets, the most popular being thin gnomes and trolls hanging by pins.
Our next stop was much cooler. Cascada El Pailon is a thunderous behemoth of kinetic aqua energy blasting into a sheer canyon below. It was a several minute hike that direction, walking past quite a few smaller waterfalls and bright, rain-forest orchids perched dubiously on rocky or mossy surfaces.
We also had to cross a series of wooden bridges, swaying with each footstep to reach the cliff face near the waterfalls. Pictured advertisements revealed the hike is equally impressive at night, with powerful colored lightbulbs flaring on the water and forests to give a surreal neon effect to the natural wonder.
From here, we turned the bus around and headed back into Baños , blaring the whole way. I wonder if the locals of Baños hear the busses playing music and sigh, because they’re simply dropping off annoying tourists instead of ice cream.
Baños Meals
Back in Baños , everyone was served delectable potatoes and beef soup, which smelled so good I nearly cried. After a day and a half of avoiding solid food, chewing seemed a luxury I dearly missed. The kitchen staff took pity and provided me with a blackberry smoothie, but it wasn’t quite the same.
Once again, we piled onto the bus and took a different route, this time thundering high into the mountains. The air dropped in temperature noticeably and the bus engine screamed in protest above the music during the steep incline. We gradually rose into the clouds themselves, where all visuals vanished into the light grey fog. Rain no longer fell on us, but a tenuous mist flickered everywhere, gradually dampening our tour group.
Skywoods
Finally, our bus lurched in relief and we offloaded again, climbing a small hill to reach a somewhat muddy but brilliantly gardened plateau that hosted La Casa Del Arbol, roughly translating to “The Treehouse” in English.
The main attraction in this garden is a lone, sturdy tree clutching the edge of an enormous cliff, aptly called “The End of The World.” (Between the cliffs called “The End of the World” in Sri Lanka, Ecuador, England and the “End of Earth Cliffs” in Australia, I’m inclined to think that colonialist cartographers were pessimists or drama queens).
This cliff has a small treehouse above for tourists to peer off into the distant mountains (or in our case, distant fogs). The true attraction, however, is a pair of swings hanging off the branches. A person is belted into one of these swings and flung boldly off the edge, with an occasional spin or further momentum provided by a semi-acrobatic cliffside employee. The swing is naturally known as “The Swing at the End of the World.”
Supposedly, it was built by a lonely grandfather living atop the mountain in an attempt to coax his grandchildren to visit more frequently. The wholesome ploy worked and the kids visited almost daily, with the site gaining much wider recognition after viral videos of them sky-swinging began to circulate.
Confident again my heart would be still (it was hardly the first time someone has tried to throw me over the threshold of a cliff, and this time I had rope) I spent some time in a dangling arc over a few hundred feet of open air and mist. While it’s not the first time I’ve done such a thing, it was the first time I actively paid for the experience in two dollars worth of dimes and quarters.
Finished with the little attraction, Carolina and I got two steaming cups of Canelazo (Cinnamon Spice Rum), an Ecuadorian specialty loaded with spice, juice and alcohol. That last part is vital, in my opinion, because you should never tell anyone that they’re at the End of the World without some liquor on tap.
Mountain Gallery
Our next tour destination took considerable time to get to. On the way, we stopped at several pseudo-art sculpture galleries. These outdoor tourist attractions are bulky wood, metal, plaster and plastic creations of whatever struck an artists fancy. There were vehicles made of minimal, brightly colored pipes, huge dinosaur sculptures often sprawled out on the ground, concerningly unstable green aliens, lounging, crag-faced men in cowboy hats and a dozen other minor oddities.
We eventually shuttled past these and reached La Mana de la Pachamama. This odd artistic choice is a hand emerging from the very earth of a mountain. Blue fingers emerge from green ground with a multi-colored mural forearm doubling as the bridge for potential visitors. The hand is curved upwards, making a sort of sky-nest, complete with the sculpture of a condor roosting on the webbing near the thumb.
Crowds are kept outside so people can enter in tiny groups for maximum photo opportunities. The price of entry is a bit steep, but there are more troll figures to keep loungers company and a couple more adrenaline-inducing activities for those with spare time.
Naturally, one of these activities is another cliff swing. However, this one is much larger and results in a direct drop leveling out into a bizarre arc before flinging out into open air. While a cliff and a large swing doesn’t tend to get my heart pumping, the apparatus used to launch people is a collapse-away wooden platform.
I know from a-many experiences that having the floor vanish elevates heart rates, regardless of preparation. I can jump off a cliff just fine, but I can’t have one vanish from under me. Regrettably, I didn’t get to do the big swing, while Carolina eagerly signed up.
At this point, we had one last stop in the mountains for bungie jumping, which I was also medically barred from. We finally rolled back down the mountain and into town, where we bough a whole packed of cubed sugar cane to leach juice out of on the drive home.
A Return to Cuenca
We finally returned back to Cuenca at two in the morning, parking in front of a McDonalds and awaiting a taxi to drive us back to our parked car.
Overall, Baños provided a very cool, scenic, beautiful and engaging birthday. Medical hinderances non-withstanding, I enjoyed myself immensely.
However, I don’t think Baños is best experienced in a packaged tour. The truly engaging portions of this part of the country are rooted in the adventure activities. Baños has hot springs, paragliding, rock climbing, white-water rafting, bungie jumping, jungle hiking and a dozen other adventure events. Trying to fit them into a tour is tricky and the happiest gringos I saw in Ecuador were those riding bikes around trying their hand at whatever they could.
The real trick to navigating Baños is figuring out what is and isn’t pay-to-play. The tour I paid for covered nothing but the ride around the valley and our full day of meals. Zip lining, bungie jumping, cliff swinging, additional purchases, snacks on-site and cable-car rides were all fun and relatively cheap, but costed a bit just the same.
If I return in the future, I’m more likely to move around under my own decisions and lock in locations that either offer bundles or are just downright cheaper.
Seeing as I didn’t manage to injure myself or cause profusive bleeding from a recent surgery, I’ll call this weekend a win. And as long as nobody tells my dentist about my careful flouting of doctor’s orders, it’ll stay a win.
Until next time,
Best regards and excellent trails,
Old Sean
Written September 12th 2021
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Skog Å Kust Watertight Day Bag
Everyone should have a day bag. My favorite is the Skog Å Kust Watertight Bag. It’s easy to sling over my shoulders and lets me walk without fear of m devices getting damaged in the rain. Better yet, I can go swimming with electronics whenever I need to.
