Baños and Cuenca

This past weekend was a 5 day holiday weekend for us, so we took advantage and traveled south.  Thursday morning we began our venture on a 45 min bus ride to the south bus terminal in Quito.  From this terminal, virtually every city in Ecuador can be reached.  We bought tickets to Baños.  Baños is a city about 3 1/2 hours from Quito.  It is famous for its hot springs.  When we got to Baños we found our hostel, a microbrewery, and some pizza.  Microbreweries are very rare in Ecuador, but pizza is not.  A 16" pizza was only $5.50.  We had a terrible time sleeping Thursday night because the people in the street never slept.  We later learned that this was because of a 7 hour religious pilgrimage walk from Ambato to Baños that happens every Holy Thursday.  There were thousands of people sleeping and partying on the sidewalks.  The next day, we climbed up to the statue that overlooks Baños.  We counted over 680 stairs.  After this, we started for the hot springs.  Our guide book had crappy directions and we ended up on the wrong side of the river.  Feeling frustrated, we overlooked our frugal ways and hired a cab to get to the baths.  Best 2 dollars we've spent so far.  The springs consisted of 7 different pools ranging in temperature.  We started with the hottest.  It smelled like pee and iron because the water came directly from the rocks in the floor of the pool.  The water was also yellow an murky from the natural minerals.  After we got over the smell, it was pretty refreshing.  We tried a few other pools which were cooler and smelled less, but we ultimately favored the pee pool.  A local treat of Baños is taffy.  There are many shops where people are pulling taffy on wooden pegs mounted on the doors.  We tried some fresh off the peg.  Another popular treat is to suck on pieces of sugar cane.  We bought a bag and chewed on them in the park.  Later that night we had canelazo, the traditional Ecuadorian hot drink, and watched another thousand people walk down the street toward the church singing and carrying a coffin with Jesus inside.  This night was a better night sleep because we changed rooms and there were not thousands of people sleeping in the streets.  
   The next morning we woke up and started the journey to Cuenca, a city more to the South. We tried to buy a bus ticket straight to Cuenca but that was not happening. We had to buy a ticket to Riobamba (about 2 hours away), wait in Riobamba and then continue the rest of the 7 hours to Cuenca. We were really glad to get off the bus that night. We picked out a hotel from the guide book called Hotel Pichincha. When we arrived it looked pretty nice from the street. We when found our room we realized that we had checked in to an insane asylum.  The floors creaked with every step, there was a random closet with metal bars outside our room, the room had no windows to the outside but it did have a nice creepy sink and mirror in the corner, the bed was metal, there was a small door leading to a space in the wall inside the shower and last but not least our pillows weighed 8 pounds each and John´s pillow felt like it was stuffed with balls of cat fur and corn kernels.   Not wanting to spend time in the eerily silent room we wandered around the city. After seeing the massive old cathedral and another pretty church we set out to find something to drink. We just kept walking down a random road and don´t you know... we happened on another microbrewery. What are the odds? This bar had 4 different homemade beers and they were cheap. We did not order the 1.25L beer, but if we had it would have only been $4. We sat in neat hammock swing chairs and enjoyed the drinks. After we were done we headed back to the hotel. Despite the fact that John didn't quite fit on the bed and the fact that every move resulted in a thousand squeaks, we actually slept alright.  In the morning we woke up and went to Easter mass at one of the churches that we saw the previous night. Even though we didn't understand it all it was still a nice mass. Afterward we set out to quiet our rumbling tummies. I turned down many places because they just didn't seem right. Finally we happened upon the market. On the top floor we discovered rows of ladies making breakfast. We settled on a plate of rice, pork meat and skin (for John), a hard boiled egg, potatoes and hominy and a raspberry juice. Two plates and the juice came to a whopping $2.50. We took a couple hour walk around the city to help us digest. Our walk took us past other churches, the river and lots of interesting markets. We ended up back at the first market for lunch. This time John had pork that was pulled directly from the roasted pig sitting on the counter, potatoes, and a coconut juice. Then we walked around more. Sometimes we just sat in the park and watched people too.  Since it was Sunday there was not much open and we were back to the hotel by 10. On Monday morning we had breakfast with the rice and egg lady again. Taking the advice from some people at work, we booked a flight back home instead of trying to endure the 12 hour bus trip.  Totally worth it and we got to see Cotopaxi from the plane.

Interesting fact:  When people in Ecuador describe a person's height with a hand gesture, they always keep their hand perpendicular to the ground with their thumb pointing up.  They only describe the height of animals with their hand parallel to the ground.  It could be seen as offensive to describe a person's height with a parallel hand.