Thankfully the title is misleading. Apologies for the immediate plot twist. Moving swiftly on... The first day in Baños! Still not sure why it is named bathroom but I have been further informed that it's full name is actually Baños de Agua Santa. Which I guess roughly translates to the bathroom of sacred water. I can testify to the fact that there is indeed a lot of water for it lies on the Rio Verde.
We decided to follow the Rio Verde but on bikes! After successfully negiotiating with three different tour operators to get save ourselves $6! This paid for a lunch of fried banana with cheese in, a large portion of mango and coconut, a large bottle of water and two very hot potato things that I can't quite explain due to not even really knowing anything about it other than Emma destroyed hers in about two seconds.
Back to the biking... Now we had been informed that it was a nice gentle and easy ride that was mostly downhill on a nice asphalt surface - a massive contrast to the downhill, soul-shattering ride down the side of Cotopaxi (see previous post). This was of course to the delight of Emma, who then claimed that she had never ridden a bike on an actual road before.
This was soon to become quite obvious... It took roughly a mile before Emma had a little panic. She was already struggling with the fact that they drive on the right hand side of the road (absolute weirdos) when she wanted to go around a parked car whilst a bus was trying to go around her. I was directly behind her and I could see there was actually no big incident occurring. It took me a good ten minutes of talking down a highly distressed Emma who thought the world was currently collapsing all around her - poor Emma.
Nevertheless my pep talk was successful and we managed to bike for roughly 15 miles in what turned out to be a scorching sun (my arm now looks like the Poland flag) whilst taking the waterfall route. We saw more waterfalls just today than I have in the last year combined.
Whilst the waterfalls were very impressive, my favourite moment was actually what I saw when crossing a bridge. Naturally one of the things that is normally under a bridge (not a troll) is a river and that is exactly what we saw. Yet this was not just a normal river... for it contained about 50 or so Ecuadorians enjoying the glorious sunshine and cooling off in the refreshing Rio Verde on a Sunday afternoon. We decided that this seemed like the perfect antidote to our sun soaked bodies.
As we were just drying off from the river, Emma was approached by a middle aged Ecuadorian who strangely enough asked Emma if she could take a photo of her. Naturally, a docile Emma quickly turned into a rather vain Emma who now thinks she's a celebrity... Not sure I'll ever hear the end of that.
After we were all waterfalled and biked out I was then treated to yet another first on this trip - getting a ride in the back an open top truck with our bikes as we returned to Baños.
Time to rest that sunburn... when will I learn (sorry nan).
