Baños - the Baden Baden of Ecuador

Images have now been added to the last entry. Hopefully it will work for this one too.

From the extreme cold to tropical warmth! Baños is small, touristy, relatively affluent, and lively. Above all, it is located in a fantastic place; in the mountains, but with dense vegetation and plenty of water.

You can ride downhill on a bicycle for 20km and pass by many spots to view waterfalls and do canopying. Spectacular!! But what was definitely even more adventurous was the return journey. On the back of a small truck, on hard, loose wooden benches, with 10 other passengers, 12 bicycles, and a dog in pitch darkness on bumpy gravel roads; that is Adventure Time.

As you descend further, trees, humidity, and heat increase - you enter the tropical rainforest. With your feet wet and scooping out the water that keeps pouring in, you can take a ride on a simple makeshift canoe and enjoy the surrounding vegetation, indigenous architecture, and distant snow-covered volcanoes. Even if you were lucky enough to come ashore with relatively dry feet, you would be greeted by swampy mud baths - but don't get any wrong ideas, unfortunately only for shoes and pants. Later on, I had the pleasure of applying cleansing and mosquito-repellent mud. For those brave enough, they could truly experience the rainforest to the fullest, such as by killing living crabs by perforating them with a sharp, metal object, or by beheading and consuming a fat, pulsating, yellowish-greasy, ALIVE maggot measuring 6cm long and 3cm in diameter. We weren't quite adapted to that, but we watched. We quickly rinsed off these disturbing memories with a bath in a natural pool with a built-in back shower. (Sidebar: unfortunately, not all baths in Baden Baden are as beautiful, see second to last entry). The Indio village in the Selva is also worth mentioning, including indigenous war paint, dances, and blowpipe shooting. However, the (large) animals native to the forest were only visible in the zoo. But perhaps a small real-life jaguar attack would have dampened the excursion. Furthermore, after struggling uphill to a viewpoint, you can indulge in your adrenaline addiction without any worries and swing over the open abyss.