Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos

While in the Galapagos, Kevin & I spent the majority of our time on Isla Santa Cruz.  Each island is distinct and it's worthwhile to venture further into the archipelago.  A lot of travelers told us they favored Isla Isabella. We certainly can see the allure, but I loved all that Isla Santa Cruz has to offer.

It's more populated, but that also offers greater variety in housing and restaurants.  (And populated is relative on the Galapagos.  Population is tightly regulated to protect the natural ecosystems.)  There are also plenty of agencies offering cruises through the islands or day tours.  We checked out a lot of the tour offerings and wound up creating some for ourselves.  Instead of paying a tour company to take us to the lava tunnels and beaches of the highlands, we rented bikes for the day and went independently.

The guy you see below is in the shadows by my bike.

Laguna Las Ninfas is in town proper.  We spent several mornings watching pelicans or simply being by the water.

Quickly, I discovered that my favorite day in the Galapagos was a morning spent swimming in Las Grietas, a nearby grotto, followed by lunch in town, and an afternoon lazing at Tortuga Bay Beach.

From the docks we paid $.60 for a water taxi to take us to the opposite and visible shore.  (Asking for Finch Bay Hotel will do the trick.)  We followed signs for Las Grietas through a harsh landscape.

To arrive here

Many visitors brought their own snorkel mask.  Honestly, I didn't think it was necessary.

Kevin even did one of his epic foolish jumps:

Obviously, between that & the hiking, lunch was in order.  After lunch we liked to hike the three miles to Tortuga Bay.  Honestly, this place deserves it's own post.  The beach is only open between 6 am and 6 pm. The hours are to protect turtles who come onto the beach to nest.  The park rangers diligently enforce these rules.

Three miles of paved trail.  Towards the end of the day you pass multiple local joggers making their rounds up and back to the beach.  And at the end of the road...

Stay tuned for a future post highlighting this beautiful beach.  

I enjoyed basing my time in the Galapagos out of Santa Cruz.  We alternated spending a day on another island with our favorite days of Grotto and beach hopping.  This way, we saw a good bit of Galapagan diversity while still slowing down to a turtle's pace.  Affordably.

Traveling to the Galapagos

In February of 2012, Kevin & I had a night to kill in a Vietnamese port town.  The following morning we would finish our travel in Vietnam by passing a few days on the beaches of Phu Quoc Island.  Our home for the night was largely a place where people lived & worked.  We spent a significant period of time establishing that fact, and that most restaurants were little family hole-in-the-wall eateries.  While we circled the same blocks, Lonely Planet in hand, we saw another couple, obviously Western, doing the same.

Ultimately, we decided to share a table & had a wonderful night swapping travel adventures & getting to know one another.  They were traveling the world & had been on the road for a year.  I asked them their three favorite places.  Their response:  The Galapagos, New Zealand, & Namibia.

This is generally how Kevin & I set our next destination.

This past fall I booked two tickets for Quito, Ecuador.  As my research developed I learned that travel within Ecuador would be fairly inexpensive.  The Galapagos, on the other hand, is notoriously expensive.  The biggest obstacle is that you have to purchase an additional flight.  & this isn't like a $40 domestic internal Vietnamese flight.  This is like a real flight, often around $500 from Quito or Guayaquil.

Kevin & I talked about whether or not we could afford this adventure.  There's plenty to see and do on Ecuador's mainland.  We didn't want to be irresponsible or greedy!  We also weren't big on a cruise.  The top-rated cruise for the Galapagos is run by National Geographic.  It costs several grand, but features delicious food and world-class nature guides.  Alternately, you can island hop and stay in their hotels if you would prefer less time on a boat.  Again, I looked into some of these hotel rooms.  Discount rooms were close to $300 a night.

You can book budget cruises online or less expensively at hostals and travel agents in Quito.  We looked into some of that.  It's a really mixed bag.  You may pay $800 a person for 4 nights and 5 days to stay on an oily clunker, eating terrible food with drunk backpackers.  Or, you may luck out and meet wonderful people while seeing more of the archipelago.  While Kevin & I perused brochures in Quito a sunburnt Australian told us he'd just returned from three weeks in the Galapagos.  We asked him if it was possible to go on a budget.  He said, "First.  Not if.  You HAVE to go.  And yes, you can budget."

He & his wife stayed at hostals on several islands.  They rented boats for transport, which turned out to be easily arranged at the main docks.  Kevin & I nodded each other.  We'd book a flight and figure it out when we landed.  That's generally the game plan.

We tried a few travel agents but couldn't find an enticing fare.  We went to an internet cafe (always an exercise in frustration with Ecuador's reliably horrible internet connections) to research fares.  It took diligence and patience but I was ultimately able to book us two tickets.  With the dates set, we continued our overland journey, knowing we had to be at the Guayaquil airport by February 14.

We flew into Isla Baltra, the main airport on the Galapagos.  Passengers pay $100 to enter the national park (& you have to have that in cash) & are efficiently ferried onto buses.  The bus took us a short distance to a ferry, where we were greeted by these guys.

That's how it is in the Galapagos.  Ridiculous.  Seals (or sea wolves, translated from Spanish) behave like a cross between Golden Retrievers and drunks.  It's bright and improbable and real.

On the other side of the ferry we paid a fare for the public bus to take us to Santa Cruz town.  Taxis run about $18 vs around $2 for bus fare.  Once in town, we caught a quick taxi to Red Mangrove, the one hotel I knew to request.  Obviously, the hotel was far outside of our budget, but we decided to get lunch while we got our bearings.  While waiting for sushi and tempura we met this fellow.

Properly fortified & enchanted, we walked along the water's edge towards town.  There are plenty of hostals and hotels.  Some are gross concrete institutions that charge a reasonable $10 a night, while some seemed (from the outside) downright hip.  We found La Peregrina for $50 that first night.  It was all that was available.  It cost twice what we hoped to pay, and twice what we usually paid on the mainland, but that's often the case in the Galapagos.  We decided to put our bags down and continue exploring in the morning.

I was also concerned about eating vegetarian in the Galapagos.  In my experience, island food is often pretty limited.  A lot of archipelagos have to get food shipped in from the mainland, or diets revolve around fish and fruit.  The Galapagos had a surprising range of food given the micro-climates on many islands.  Food wasn't great (it's really not great, by my tastes, anywhere in Ecuador) but I certainly had plenty of vegetarian options.

The following morning we found a hostal for $25 a night that would accept credit cards!  Our prayers were answered.  That meant we could extend our time in the Galapagos.  Ultimately, we changed our return destination from Guayaquil to Quito to connect directly to our home-bound flight.  The change only cost $20 and enabled us to stay for 10 days in the enchanted Galapagos.

Pacha Mama

These mountains created

walls around me

& I keep thinking of them, the

mountains, the room of the

valley, the feeling of not being stuck but

being contained, held in energy, and earth

and the bowl of a sky

The bowl of the sky? I'd heard that phrase before it's

not mine but it never landed until

the sky was a bounded enclosure not

endless expanse

I've been in mountains of various

shades, ranging heights, and the scents of

cardamom or juniper or pine or the smell of fog

and snow. Sun. Fragrant sun.

These mountains helped me understand

words. Bowls of sky and the absorption of

Self into earth. “You approach the mountain until

you no longer see it. You are within it.” How are

you within a mountain? When it builds its walls around

you and when you begin to note it's exposed veins (drilling) and

they feel like your wound and you

feel the heat of water knowing

the warmth is coursing from the lava still

flowing within

I didn't know what Pacha Mama meant, who she

referred to-- I heard her sung I saw her written I

heard her name. I heard her name and wondered who

Maybe she calls you in. Maybe it's a siren's call

to be enveloped by her walls, sheltered

within the green, to be under the

bowl of sky

held

Pacha Mama, Mama Andes, these mountains that

are a spine, that hold the earth upright that keep me

upright my calves sore from climbing up and up

and still the bowl of the sky is far away I am

never absorbed into the sky just

these walls of earth of rock

I wanted to write words as soon as I

entered her

as soon as I found myself in the valley

within her walls within

her mountains within

her

I had words. I didn't know what, why, but there

were stories in me, in her

as I was in her I had a song to sing, I knew her

name

On the road from Ambato to Guayaquil

Early in the morning, the day after my 32nd birthday, Kevin & I wandered down the sleepy streets of Banos to the bus station.  We boarded for Ambato where we intended to catch a second bus south to Guayaquil.

We reached Ambato quickly.  It felt like a dusty outpost.  We wandered trying to understand where we could encounter a Guayaquil bus.  Finally, we realized we were a good distance from town center and the bus depot.  We caught a taxi to take us directly to the Guayaquil terminal.

As we entered Ambato I realized it's a real live city!  We had just missed the fruit & flowers festival.  Ambato is another mountain town with many varied micro-climates.  Within the city limits a plethora of edibles & bright bounty grow.  Happily, we found our bus depot and boarded.

Riding buses in Ecuador can feel like a roller coaster.  Within the Andes, highways generally hug the edge of the mountain & no one slows around the switchbacks.  Kevin read & blocked out our peril.  I kept an eye on what was beautiful & sometimes pressed my eyes tightly closed when we narrowly missed another semi.

The ride from Ambato to Guayaquil was somewhat otherwordly.  We descended and climbed mountains.  We skirted volcanoes.  Ultimately, we crept into jungle and then coastline.  I wanted months to repeat the journey, stopping along the way.

Outside of Ambato the landscape became truly impressive.  The Andes opened up to several valleys.  Most of the land was farmed & often by Indigenous practices of terracing.  As we rounded one valley I saw a woman standing at the edge of a cliff, wearing a magenta scarf.  There was no one else.

We slid into another valley where the highway created a C-curve framing out a raised soccer field.  As we rode around the field we saw a spirited and muddy game played between two goals fashioned out of naked sticks.  On the other side of the highway, to my right, an elderly Indigenous couple sat at a cliff over-hang to watch the match.

We saw signs for Riobamba and skirted the edge of Ecuador's tallest Volcano, Chimborazo.  The volcano is covered by glacial ice despite the temperate climate of the valley below.

Andes grasses gave way to orchids and the density of Jungle greenery.  Gradually this opened and the air became softer.  We entered coastal Guayaquil to a ocean-front thunderstorm.  The highway quickly accumulated a few inches of water while the humid air was cooled.  In Guayaquil we found a well-rated hostal and a Chinese restaurant for dinner.

Culturally, Guayaquil is distinct from the rest of Ecuador.  There are differences between speech and customs when you travel from Andes to Amazon, but none so profound as entering the Pacific coast.  It's so interesting to me that the coast always sets itself apart.  Coastal culture is always slower from the interior (though nowhere in Ecuador is fast-paced!), there's a thicker pattern of speech, colorful phrasing, and spicier food.  People look a little different, they walk with a more pronounced sway.

We didn't have long to experience coastal Ecuador because our flight to the Galapagos left the following morning.  I was somewhat wary of Guayaquil after all the trash talk we heard in Quito.  There is a HUGE rivalry between the two cities.  Politically, Quito has always been more conservative whereas Guayaquil has been a hotbed of Left-y politics & union organizing.  I had hoped to catch a Guayaquil v. Quito soccer game in Quito before we flew back to the States.  I shared my plan with a Quito taxi driver.  He advised, "Watch out for those Guayaquil fans!  They're crazy!"

Dude, I'm from Philly.

We wound up extending our time in the Galapagos and flying directly back to Quito to connect with our U.S. bound flight, so the soccer game never materialized.  Before leaving Guayaquil I popped open Kurt Vonnegut's dystopian satire, Galapagos.  The novel begins as the world ends.  The story starts in Guayaquil, where the protagonists anxiously fend off starving masses and a police state before seeking safety in the Galapagos.  I read hungrily in the airport waiting for our plane.  As I boarded, I really felt like this was the Apocalypse.

From jungle to mountains to sea to islands that feel on the verge of nothing.  Ecuador winds you through the landscape of human experience.  As I think back to my time on the equator I certainly remember people and food and the various flavors of travel.  But more than anything, I think of the land.  More than anywhere else, I feel like that land crawled inside of me.  The mountains and valleys and plants have an undeniably vibrant life.  They affected me.  They affect.

We're Wrong

Riding in a bus between the jungles and Andes of
Ecuador there was one thought landing
more heavily than any competitor: "We're wrong."

I look out the window at decaying
missions, harbingers of "hope" that sold
land, flesh, belief and
now NGOs and mining & drilling
companies who build schools and
hospitals to once again teach literacy
after contracts are signed

Teach lessons on construction sites, at the helms of
oil wells, in classrooms, on the labels of pills
prescribed at the clinic
teach how to live.
Teach how to live when the jungle is
gone when the mountains are blasted when
flesh and hope and belief  are
sold

People who look like me staff
the embassies and company headquarters
and clinics and schools.  I could easily
get a job teaching how to live when
the other people who look like me
have auctioned off the land and plants and water
and air and flesh and hope

What do I know about how to live?  The way
I live doesn't work.  The way I live supports a
few people who look like me (not all) and

I'm told I have skills.  I can teach in schools
and clinics in places like this that are
being sold for parts.  I don't have skills.
I don't know how to grow food or build
shelter or birth or cook or be present

My parents hired people who had skills.  These
people cleaned and planted and built.  Why would
I then be exported to build and clean and plant
and teach?

The world is finite and bounded and I look
out the window of a bus traveling the
country from jungle to Andes in Ecuador
and I see companies from my home and I
know that earth, mineral, plant, substance will
be robbed here and mined and sold and
taken to where I live

and the people who were robbed and stolen
and whose lives were changed will be taught
how to live in the aftermath of theft, robbery,
rape, and destruction

I am watching from the bus window.  I am
grateful for teachers (who look like these people,
from the jungle, the mountains, the cities) who are
patient with me, who teach me.  I am grateful
for heart and space and room to not

My head leaned against the bus window it
rattled it bruised my temple and buzzed my skin
and my knees wrapped to my chest gently
resting against the seat back of the man in front
of me (I hope not digging into his back) and I saw
a sign announcing that this town was named "Shell."

(steven biko. nigeria. massacres and oil.  shell)

I passed the first manicured lawn I'd seen yet

(like the only manicuredmassacred lawn I saw in
all of Cuba, in Havana, at the U.S. Interest Section [housed
by the Swiss Embassy] where dark-skinned people
served iced tea on trays to light-skinned people)

I passed the first gated community I'd seen since arriving there
was a sign "Shell employees and guests."  I saw more visible
poverty surrounding this community than anywhere else
in the country.

On my lap, on this bus, jiggling through the mountains
and communities named
after corporations founded where I'm from a book written
by a NY Times journalist about Indigenous
struggles for land against powerful companies like
Shell and other multinationals busy drilling for copper
and oil or pharmaceutical companies looking for drugs in the rainforest
(and in their wake communities, ways of life destroyed
replaced by clinics and schools
and teachers teaching how to live in the aftermath
of oil and copper and drugs and progress)

We're wrong.  How I live (a life based on drugs, extracted from
these jungles, with technology, made from minerals in these
mountains, from exploitation, from globalization, from NAFTA)
is wrong
the story I was told that well-meaning people know
how to live can teach others
(in the jungles, on farms, in the mountains, in
the cities, in ghettoes)
how to live is wrong.

This is why I sit in buses and cross countries.  This is
why I take journeys into earth and jungle
and thick midnight and early mornings and ask and
thank my teachers.  I watch.  I watch villagers in
Vietnam rebuild and farm out of milk jugs and I watch
people in Guatemala build houses out of litter and
I watch people in Ecuador in the streets, in the jungle, from the
bus window, across the table

I know many point to statistics and life
expectancy and how well-meaning people who
look like me who come from where I come from vaccinate
and feed and shelter and change
and the statistical evidence of improvement
and it looks like this
it looks like the town of "Shell" and strip-mined
West Virginia and sold-for-parts Camden
and then gated communities and manicured lawns

I want to live differently.  I saw rain barrels on roofs in Panama
(and hear of workshops at home) I see teachers everywhere.  People
live in scale out of necessity and sometimes by choice.  Not saints,
not sinners.  The way to not see scarred earth & starved
inhabitants is to stop stealing.  That's the cost of making IPhones and
cars and drugs and toys.
I want to break my own addictions.

We don't have to steal and then teach
those who have been robbed
how to live
We can live differently
I can live differently
I can learn and be thankful and watch
and observe and
Stop taking from
or allowing the taking from
or permitting the taking from
and simply be here
(and let others be there)

Intention is a Political Project

The other day I began to reconceive of certain political projects as acts of intention.  Specifically, I remember what guided me to certain parts of the world, like Cuba, Costa Rica, and Ecuador.  I wanted to go to Cuba to better understand the realities of socialism.  I went to Costa Rica knowing that a large portion of the wild is protected from development & also off-limits to humans for a day each week.  After learning that in 2008 Ecuador amended its constitution to reflect the rights of animals, land, and bodies of water, I booked a trip.

In each of these places there is still tremendous work to be done to live upto stated ideals.  However, in my own (limited) experience in these places, I did come to understand the power of these intentions.

I was an exchange student in Havana, Cuba for a semester in 2001.  I remember being so overwhelmed by the lack of privacy.  Any time I walked down the street someone would sidle up and walk alongside me, making animated conversation.  Now, those of you who know me know that I can talk.  This overwhelmed even me!  I'm accustomed to a certain level of anonymity on U.S. streets.  I'm used to being able to walk out my door, to a coffee shop, and reside in the privacy of my own thoughts.  That simply wasn't an option in Cuba.  I remember spending too much time in my room (much to my roommate's chagrin) simply because I wanted time with no questions, no conversation, no quick friendships.

My roommate, Kieu, across the table in Barrio Chino, Havana, Cuba

Finally, I asked one of my new best friend's why I couldn't have any privacy.  "Privacy?  Why do you need privacy?  This is a Socialist country.  We share resources and space.  What do you need for yourself?"  It was such an interesting response.  I had never considered the impact of economic organization on my interpersonal relationship!  Why did I deserve privacy?  What did it really accomplish?  Throughout the world people and animals live much more communally and much more publicly.  There are benefits and deficits to this just as there are benefits and deficits to having privacy.  It's simply a matter of what we're accustomed to-- the space to which we feel entitled.

There were so many similar lessons in Cuba.  I met people who had been part of the Revolution and recalled their ideals, their intentions.  Another aspect of no privacy was relentless cat calls, the ubiquitous, "Oya, nena!" accompanied by hissing sounds.  I found a feminist who had thrown molotov cocktails to oust Batista, alongside Che.  I asked her how she reconciled some of these ideals of equality with such prevalent street harassment of women.  She recalled having visited the U.S. in her youth.  "I felt invisible there."  She mentioned that in the U.S. catcalls often spoke to another type of aggression-- the threat of physical attack by men on women.  While these attacks certainly occur in Cuba as well, they're not always linked to verbal attention.  Again, I can't say I feel comfortable with men's vocal comments to women on the streets of Havana, but it helped me understand that it didn't necessarily signify the same as in the U.S.

Kevin biking on the Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica

When Kevin & I traveled to Costa Rica, I was initially shocked to learn that most parks were closed for a day out of every week to give the land, plants, and animals a respite from human presence.  A troubling sense of entitlement bubbled up in me, "Why can't I go?  That's inconvenient for me to reschedule."  On second thought, I was able to grasp how little my convenience mattered in the larger scale of prioritizing the needs of the natural world.  Again, this policy of rest for these spaces doesn't completely combat the ills of human presence on the natural world.  It's a step, and a powerful step.  It shifted, greatly, my sense of the needs of the natural world.

Basilica Del Voto, Quito, Ecuador

On our first day in Quito, Ecuador, Kevin & I visited the Basilica del Voto.  This Basilica famously depicts many images from the natural world to best show worship to the divine presence in all things.  As the photos above demonstrate, any view might offer a turtle, toucan, goat, or tree.  The holiness of the natural world is brought within the walls of the Basilica.

Ecuador changed its Constitution to reflect the rights of land, water, air, plants, and animals.  Perhaps this intention is best demonstrated on the Galapagos islands.

Floreana Island, Galapagos, Ecuador

We were searched thoroughly before flying to the Galapagos.  Park security is vigilant to ensure that no foreign seeds, animals, or other potentially interfering matter is brought into the delicate eco-system of the archipelago.  Hiking through the Charles Darwin center, we found plenty of public restrooms, trashcans, recycing, and compost centers.  I was surprised!  Kevin pointed out that where there aren't publicly accessible restrooms, people make other arrangements.  This certainly will affect plant, soil, and animal life.

Heron, Tortuga Bay, Isla Santa Cruz, Galapagos, Ecuador

Iguana, Tortuga Bay, Isla Santa Cruz, Ecuador

Tortuga Bay on Isla Santa Cruz, was our favorite beach on the Galapagos.  These iguanas sun, swim, & live throughout the beach.  Therefore the beach is only open from 6-6 every day.  After sundown humans are cleared off the beach.  This also gives the turtles opportunity to come on shore.

None of these policies has completely stabilized the intricate network of human, plant, and animal needs.  I don't know of a community that has found the balance necessary for optimal health for all.  However, the collective intention, the stated goal of care & protection for one another, and specific populations, shifts the attention of everyone within the community.  As a visitor to all these places, I was deeply changed.  I carry these lessons & work to enact them in my daily life.  I set intention and recognize the power and potential in that act.

Banos

From Misahualli, Ecuador, Kevin & I hopped on a local bus through the Amazon & back to Tena.  Tena is a relatively larger town, though both are tiny outposts against the jungle growth.  We were reaching the heights of Carnivale so every walk down the street involved being chased by kids with water guns & spray shaving cream.  Wearily, we found our bus for Banos.

Given that we were approaching Banos from the southwest, we wound up riding Ruta de las Cascadas, the famous winding highway of waterfalls.  Many tourists mountain bike down this road & around the mountain tunnels.  I have to say, I was OK taking in the view from bus windows.  

As I approached Ruta de las Cascadas, & then Banos proper, I began to feel walled in by the Andes.  I wasn't claustrophobic nor was this unpleasant.  But the mountains literally seemed to become walls.  Their presence was so all-pervasive.  I felt inhabited by them.  

I'm reading Joan Halifax right now.  She talks about pilgrimages to mountains & how mountains disappear as we draw nearer.  For a time, we approach & see their grandeur from a distance.  As we draw closer, we are absorbed into them.  Spending significant stretches of time in mountains or near them, we start to understand their living dynamism.  Mountains stretch, grow, crumble, and shape those near them.  Their presence looms.

 Banos is known for taffy made from locally harvested sugarcane.  Ecuador grows everything.  There are so many microclimates & so much fertility that even in the temperate mountains I found what has always been to me a tropical crop: sugar cane.  There are obviously plentiful resources nearby!

I wound up purchasing a fair amount of taffy to bring home to friends & loved ones.  I tried some & it tasted like burnt sugar.  It was kind of delicious!  The flavors were all made with local fruits: lemon, watermelon, blackberry, strawberry, & blueberry.

We were still in the throes of Carnivale.  Banos is a popular destination for Ecuadorian tourists!  We had heard that Banos is possibly the most Gringo town.  During Carnivale, it was dominated by Ecuadorians.  Also, most rooms were booked far in advance.  I had heard about a well ranked bed & breakfast called Magic Stone, so we hiked there first.  They were of course, full.  We wound up hiking to nine hotels, hostals, & B & Bs before finally finding a tiny cell in a downtown hostal.  Of course there was a shared bath down the hall with only cold water (& Banos gets COLD at night!).  Kevin loved our tiny cell.  It only fit a desk and a glorified twin bed.  He felt like a monk & sat down to meditate.  I chalked it up to adventure & swallowed at having to pay $20 for this room.  Way, way over-priced.

 Things looked promising in the morning.  We went back to Magic Stone & found they had room for us!  They were cleaning the room so we left our things there & wandered back into town.  The following day was my birthday.  All I really wanted was clean laundry, a good meal, and comfortable night's rest.

 As we were a few days before the presidential election, there were Correia posters everywhere.  The aesthetic kills me.  He looks like a savior!  This poster was hung in the bodega where we left our laundry.

 At night we found $25 hour-long massages with local medicinal herbs.  OK, on my birthday I generally want clean laundry, a good meal, a comfortable night's rest, & a massage.  Check, check, check, & check.

 Our room at Magic Stone was ready.  We were SO happy!  So beautiful!

 Since arriving in Ecuador, but most strongly felt in Banos, I wanted to write.  I wanted to sit at this desk & fall into the flow of creativity.  There was something about that place & especially those mountains.  We only had a little over three weeks in Ecuador.  I thought about staying for a longer period in Banos & surrendering to that creative impulse.  It would have meant experiencing less travel in the country.  Ultimately, I decided to take advantage of my time by experiencing as much as I could and hoping that creative impulse would stay with me as I journeyed back home.

(It did, but it was diluted.  I want to go back.)

 Banos absolutely has the best restaurants in Ecuador.  Our favorite was La Petite Restaurant, a French-North African spot within a hotel.  That avocado salad?  A double portion on my birthday.  The staff came to know me in our three days at Banos because I came & ate that salad twice daily.

 Banos is known for outdoor activities like hiking, biking, and para-gliding, good food, & their famous baths. The natural baths are heated & saturated in minerals from underground lava currents.  On my birthday morning we hiked to El Salado, said to be the stronger of the baths.  It was us, the locals, & Ecuadorian tourists.

After rinsing off we hiked back to Magic Stone and came across this sculpture.  Obviously I'm not the only one inspired by the looming Andes.

Misahualli

A half hour from Tena, you find the small, sleepy village of Misahualli.  I found it to be the most beautiful town in the region.  Like Tena, there are nearby jungle lodges, some on the river.  There's a soft sand beach along the shore.

We had landed in Tena during Carnivale.  Tons of Ecuadorian families descended into the region to celebrate & enjoy the jungle.  A fair had set up in Tena with rides, sweets, & bright lights.  Children and teenagers had begun the Carnivale practices of spraying one another with shaving cream, spraying water guns, splashing water, & throwing water into open bus windows.  We saw people in a dump truck, camped out, dousing those passing by!

Sergio, the guide who took us hiking into El Gran Canon, told us there were also fun celebrations in Misahualli & that we would be guaranteed to see monkeys if we visit!  I love seeing animals in their natural habitat.  The following morning Sergio met us with his 9-year-old son Rey, his 6-year-old daughter Bindi, and his 2-year-old son, Sergio.

 As soon as we walked into the jungle lining the river we saw masses of monkeys overhead.

 A mother & baby capuchin crossed our path.

 On the river banks I taught Rey & Bindi some yoga.  Bindi held my hand as we wandered through the maze of vendors, shaving cream, sprayed water & into the jungle.

From Misahualli we boarded a bus back to Tena.  We found a direct bus to Banos and began to once more ascent the Andes.