South American Busses, revisited

We've been aboard several busses in South America since our 20 hour ride to Pasto. While that adventure seemed crazy at the time, we quickly learned that anything goes on the busses around here. Yesterday, we decided to make our way to Puerto Lopez. This involved walking down the street and yelling "Puerto Lopez!" to the man hanging out the door of an oncoming bus. The bus pulled over and we boarded in the middle of the street. The first bus took us to a small town about an hour away, where we had to change busses. Once again, you just shout out where you want to go, and somebody runs toward you and scoops you into their bus. This one had a luggage storage compartment underneath, so we gave the driver our bags to stow. When he opened the compartment, there was a live, full grown chicken that was being transported as luggage. Its head and the majority of its body were hanging out of a black plastic bag. I guess we are lucky that it was not brought as a carry on item.

The ride on our second bus for the day was about 3.5 hours and took us to another station in what we believe to be Puerto Viejo. Let me tell you... it is a hell hole. We were stopped for about 45 minutes while other passengers changed busses and new passengers came abord. During this time, several vendors took the opportunity to come onto the bus and walk up and down the narrow aisle selling various things. I took the liberty of writing down some of the more interesting items...

They include: CDs, toothbrushes, baggies of coconut water with chunks of coconut floating in them, whole unfrosted cakes, fried chicken rings, a net hammock, sunglasses, reading glasses, whole loaves of bread, water, mangos, potholders, plastic cups of homemade gelatinous substance, peeled oranges, belts, and potholders, among others that I'm sure I missed. Also during our "break", we saw the bus driver's assistant and some friends syphon a gallon of gas out of a motorcycle and into a plastic jug.

I also took this "break" opportunity to have a look at the busses around us. At the back of the "nice" busses, there is often a small bathroom. They need to block out the window so that peepers can't see people with their pants down. In Ecuador, most busses do this by placing a large decal of a stripper (or similar) over the entire window. Trust me, it looks super classy when several of these are lined up next to each other. As an aside, these bathrooms are for women only - men just ask the driver to pull over and take a whiz on the side of the road.

Eventually, we ended up switching busses a final time for the hour long ride into Puerto Lopez. Our final bus was interesting... all of the seats were stuck in a fully reclined position. I basically had someone laying in my lap, and I was stuck in an awkward slumped position. The head rest seemed to be missing the foam cushion, so it mostly consisted of a bar of metal wrapped in faux leather that was jamming into my head. The nice thing about being the only white folks on the bus is that when it was time for us to get off, the person manning the door just yelled "gringos!" and waved for us. The driver stopped to let me off, then accelerated with Daniel still standing in the doorway. After Daniel started yelling at the driver in English, he slowed down a few meters ahead of where I was standing. Daniel jumped off the moving bus and we were on our way. It was nerve wracking, but we made it to the correct destination, in one piece, and the chicken did not poop on our bags.

We did not know where we would be sleeping last night. The plan was to just walk down the main road and find a place. As soon as we were off the bus, we were approached by multiple people wanting to take us to different hostels. We waved them all away, and made our way to the beachfront area. We ended up finding a place with the golden trifecta: wifi, hot water, and air conditioning! So far, we have mostly been able to get two out of the three, so this was a real treat. It was a little pricey ($25 a night), but I was able to bargain for $10 off if we stay for three more nights. The only downside is that the city shuts off all electricity for several hours each day, seemingly at random.

Baños, Ecuador

We spent a few days in Baños, which is in central Ecuador, and is known for adventure sports and as a jumping off point for trips into the Amazon. We're going to wait until Bolvia for our Amazonian adventures as we've heard that the tours in Baños don't go that far into the jungle.

During our time in Baños we attempted a 60km bike ride to Puyo (bikes were $5/day). This is touted as "mostly downhill" which is true, but the uphill portions are... mountains. That, combined with the altitude and a heavy rain storm stopped us about 18km in. At 18km you can visit El Pailon del Diablo which is a waterfall towards the bottom of a canyon. We parked our bikes and headed down to take a look. It had rained the night before and the waterfall was in full force. We dawned our rain gear and out onto the viewing deck. Well worth the $1.50 per person to see.

We hiked up the trail (significantly less fun than the way down) and had a relatively expensive ($5) trout lunch. We then headed out just as it was starting to rain. We made it another kilometer or two and the rain really started to pick up. We were exhausted from what we'd already encountered for the day so we turned back. Getting back to Baños involved flagging down a truck driver, throwing our bikes into the back, and hopping into the back ourselves as the front seat was already occupied by other bikers.

On our second day we rented a "Boogie" which is essentially an all terrain go cart type thing. We drove that out the same road which was quite fun. On our way back the rear wheel started to go flat so we quickly made our way back to Baños.

Now, Baños has its name due to the hot bathes that are here from the local volcano. You'll notice that I did not, at any point, mention visiting them. We decided to skip the bathes, they look dirty and are essentially large public swimming pools that are really hot. If you decide to visit them, let us know how they were.

Baños is really touristy, but certainly worth spending a couple of days in. The activities are reasonably priced and despite our mechanical/weather related issues we had a lot of fun.

Click for all of our pics from Baños

Cuicocha Lake

One of our days in Otavalo was a day trip to Cuicocha, a caldera outside the smaller surrounding city of Catacachi. A caldera is just a large crater that forms when the land at the center of a volcano collapses. In this case it created a lake and two islands in the middle. We hiked 4.3 miles (2.15 miles out and back) around the ridge of the volcano. Thanks to Jordan's Garmin watch we know that we hiked up 971 feet to a total elevation of 11,059ft. I'd certainly recommend this for anyone in the area, it was fantastically beautiful.

We left ourselves 6 hours to do the hike which ended up not being quite long enough to go entirely around the rim, but that was fine as by the time we were back we were both exhausted.

For anyone that might be wanting to visit Cuicocha, you can get there from Otavalo by just heading to the bus terminal. Catch the next bus to Catacachi, it should be $0.25 each direction per person. Then catch a cab from Catacachi to Cuicocha which should be $5 each direction. It is recommend to arrange a pick up time with your driver as there aren't any taxis at the lake.

Once there you can take a boat to the center island and view some of the local wildlife (we didn't do this), you can't actually get on the islands as they're protected. Or you can do what we did and hike around the caldera. The entrance to the trail is just by the entrance of the whole park.

Here are the pictures we took while there.