baños

 last weekend, i went to a small town called baños about 4 hours south of quito with some friends from the capital. it's famous for so many adventure sports, about 60 waterfalls and hot spring pools. that's the view from our first hotel, called club ejecutivo. really good hotel for not much money!

 that's one of these tourist-vans to see the route of the waterfalls. instead of doing that, we rented a jeep :-)

cool wall in fron of the hotel

main square with the church

inside the church, during mass. i'm such a respectless tourist taking pictures while the people are praying :-)

 in front of the church, you can buy a lot of unnecessary stuff.

on saturday morning, while looking for a place to have breakfast, we decided spontaneously to go canyoning. that's climbing down waterfalls. these are the first two we did.

 julian going down the first one.

and me! i was afraid to release my arms for the picture :-)

 group picture. the 5 on the left is our group, the 4 on the right are people we didn't know.

paco (orange helmet on the left) wend diving a bit in the third waterfall.

...so i climbed down on the other side.

the fourth one was a slide. i was the first person to go down there and was so not prepared for a different way of going down. the guide just told me: "sit down, put your arms like that" and then pushed me. was great fun though!

 that's the fifth and last waterfall. 45 meters, free fall. first, you had to climb a few meters down, as always. then, you were at the edge and had to let yourself fall back. i was almost telling the guide that i wanted to return, but then he already had let me go :-)

guillo hanging around.

 me after the free fall. the last bit was slowly :-)

picture of the whole cascada.

 paco in horizontal position :-)

our group after the adventure!

then, we went back to the town to eat in the best restaurant in the whole country. it's so authentically swiss, amazing! and the best thing is that you can't even have rice (here, you eat rice all day long. and nothing more)

the menu, i so felt at home :-)

paco and mary looking at the flags of the cantons.

paco had milanese, mary and guillo stroganov. all of them with rösti!! before, i tried to explain that dish. as they didn't know what hash browns was, it was quite difficult and they thought it was like potato-balls-purée.

julian had "züri gschnätzlets" and in my frying pan there is pizokel. was so delicious!

after lunch, we wanted to rent some vehicle to do the route of the waterfalls. we didn't take this one, we decided to take a jeep.

driving through a lot of tunnels to get there!

and also over a few bridges...

on the parking space, there was a bus with "jesus, my loyal friend" on and some geese.

 that was our jeep, with our julian :-)

walking down to the waterfall, we took a picture with a boa. happy she didn't strangle us!

 "welcome to the best tourist center in ecuador"

 huge rocks

 waterfall "pailon del diablo", translated like "devils big frying pan" because there is such a huge basin where the water falls into.

top of the waterfall with some bridge.

 that's "grieta del cielo". you have to crawl through a cave to get to the top of the waterfall. and all of that just for getting wet :-)

yeah, it's cool :-)

on our way back, it was already dark. but anyways, we were able to see the "manto de la novia", fiancées gown or something like that... really pretty!

baños by night. in these streets, there is an uncountable number of agencies that sell adventure trips and vehicles to do fun stuff.

these two guys are making the candy that you see in front. it's too sweet to eat!

in the park, some old men are there with toy-horses to take pictures with.

before taking the bus home, we waited on the bridge. you can do bungee jumping there, but i think climbing down the waterfalls was enough for me :-)

baños

guillo is trying to take a picture of all of us. then, i came with my tripod :-)

and that's the result. weekend was really good. thanks amiguis :-)