Friday, April 7, 2006

We got into Baños last night just at dark. A light sprinkling rain was falling. The bus ride had been entirely uneventful and I slept through most of it as usual. It was not a very good sleep. The extreme uprightness of the seat and the motion of the bus on the winding road combined to periodically jerk me forward and awake to the confusing melange of views of Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie stealing cars in Spanish, a sad-eyed Jesus baring his thorn-wrapped heart, and white clouds trailing around an ominous volcano and much less ominous green mountains.

We were dropped off in front of a small market area and we found a semi-private corner to consult the book. Baños is a little town, even smaller than the LP map suggests. We easily walked through the faint drizzle to a hotel. "We're getting a room with a bathroom," Michael said. (You know, because of my inability to properly use a shared bathroom.)

The hotel, Hospedaje Santa Cruz, turned out to be quite nice, a hostel really, with public areas, a fireplace, a garden, and free Internet. Our room had not only a bathroom with 24 hour hot water, but an upstairs loft. Empty of furniture, but you know I sat up there for a while anyway. Lofts are cool. I wish we had a couch up there.

Baños is no stranger to the desires of the backpacker. There are an abundance of baggy tie-die pants for sale and they even have movie cafés. You know, where they play a DVD on a big-screen TV while you eat dinner? We ate vegetarian lasagna and "Hindu curry" while watching Sylvia. We stayed well away from the hippie backpacker pants. How do people even know to stock those hideous things?

This morning Baños was a revelation. Stepping out from the hostel gate we were immediately struck by the green wall behind us - a mountainside rising straight up in the air. We'd had no inkling of it last night in the dark, but now there it was, just green and solid and touching the sky. These mountains surround the entire town; it's like we're in a little bowl. It's gorgeous.

Volcan Tungurahua is not visible from town; you have to do some hiking or driving to see it. (Our hostel offers the chance to ride out there at night and see the glowing cone for $5.) But it's there, all right. Baños was evacuated when Tungurahua began erupting in 1999, but when nothing major had happened in the next few months, residents forced their way though blockades and went back home. But it's still out there smoldering with dangerous possibility. If I lived here, I'd probably be more comfortable if I could keep an eye on it myself, rather than having to depend on newspaper reports.

We learned today that while the town does cater to the foreign tourist, it is also a vacation town for Ecuadorians. It's cram-jammed with hotels. And weird clown-headed trash cans. Four-wheeler rentals abound and happy, helmeted locals zip around town on them by the hour. You can buy your fill of inflated cartoon characters and bootleg DVDs. And there's toffee. Called melcocha, it's sold in every store and market stall, and you can watch it being pulled on that one street where they're always pulling toffee from the doorframes. (It's a small town, you'll find it.)

Pulling melcocha looks like a lot of work. It seems to be specifically a man's job as we saw no women doing it, though we did see women wrapping the finished product in little sheets of plastic. It's fun to watch melcocha being pulled but I didn't love eating it. It's extremely sweet, with a very suspicious raisin flavor, and it comes in Hershey-bar shaped blocks from which it's nearly impossible to separate a piece small enough to eat. You're stuck either breaking a tooth trying to bite it or knawing at it until the drool runs down your arm. Luckily it's nice and cheap, at about twenty-five cents for five blocks that we'll never be able to finish.

After our melcocha experience, we took our sticky selves to the Basilica de Nuestra Señora de Agua Santa. After Quito I'm kind of ruined for basilicas, but it was right there and the Lonely Planet promised bizarre paintings. These we saw. Our Lady of the Holy Water has saved quite a few people from terrible disasters, which are depicted in the paintings. If you can read Spanish, you can enjoy the explanatory paragraphs painted along the bottoms of the scenes as well. Neat.

So it's a chill little town and we will probably do some hiking and visit some of the namesake baños while we're here.

HOURS ON THE BUS: 233.25

 

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Baños, Ecuador - Hospedaje Santa Cruz on the left.

Four-wheelers for rent, Baños.

This reminds me of Coney Island. Baños.

Pulling melcocha, Baños.

Melcocha closeup.

Basilica de Nuestra Señora de Agua Santa, Baños.

Our Lady of the Holy Water saves some guy who was... peddling across a ravine on a rope?

I can't decide if I'm amused or disturbed. At least the streets are free of trash. Baños.