Baņos
Tuesday, 12 July 2005
Well, enough about toilets. Here are some non bowel related adventures.
We are currently in a town at the bottom of a very active volcano called Baņos (which is incidentally the name for toilet in Spanish). It is a great town where you can find excellent vegetarian curry which has pleased me immensely. Not that Almuerzos donīt have their place (Almuerzos are three course meals for $1.50 consisting of vegetable soup, rice, salad made out of dried peas and avocado a piece of unidentifiable meat or stew, a mixed juice and a desert of an orange or jelly or something like that).
Well yes, we went on a bike ride past many pretty waterfalls and through amazingly high mountains which stretch up past the clouds yesterday. Having massive container trucks shaking the road and overtaking us on quite precarious looking road edges and going through dank unlit tunnels hacked out of the side of the Andes added a bit of extreme sport to the whole procedings and (I think) probably made up for not getting to New Zealand. We stopped to look at the worlds fastest and coolest cable car and had our photos taken by some Equadorians called Jessica and someone else who obviously thought we were very exotic (or freakishly large). I can still feel where the bike seat was lodged into my arse. Bring back the Chopper! Mountain bikes are made for massochistic perverts.
Before that, we did a short hike around this amazingly blue lake, which was in the crator of a still active volcano. It was 200m deep and had nothing living in it because of the excretions of the volcano. Absolutely beautiful and very dizzy at 3500m above sea level. We went with a guide who knew a lot about how the indiginous people in the area use all of the plants. Which was really interesting to me. I took a lot of photos of plants, they had ones for regulating menstruation, ones for flu, stomach upsets, asthma, leaves that they used for umberellas and for flavouring chica (a great type of drink which is sometimes alcoholic). It was cool! They have loads of bilberries growing around there too which kind of made up for missing breakfast. The other great thing about ecuador is the abundence of blackberries. Blackberry juice is great.
Some of my stuff got nicked on the bus on the way here to Baņos. It was just a bag of things like jewelery, deoderant, toothbrush and tampons (which you canīt buy here), and the free frizz ease I siphoned off these people who were giving it away in Vancouver (You know when you walk past them really slowly lots of times making eye contact), this bag also contained my Grandmaīs St Christopher that our mam gave me, I thought this was a bad omen as we are right next to a volcano, but luckilly as this is a Catholic country fond of itīs tac I got another one with 3 extra bonus saints straight away. Only 40 cents - bargain! Tragically, I smell like Dans terrible sticky deoderant and am brushing my teeth with a clean towel (This works really well btw), until I find a decently large pharmacy. On the up side though I have more room in my bag for books now.
On July 14, 2005, Dan said:
New photos of this stuff up in the photos section by the way...
On July 15, 2005, Tina :) said:
Hold on to those precious tampons, Cathrine!
The pics are beautiful- so jealous... so so jealous!