Hiking & Hot Springs

Baños, Ecuador

With a little less than a week left in Ecuador, Ben, Shannon, Christi, Mac and I took an overnight bus from Lago Agrio to Baños – a small adventure town nestled in a valley and surrounded by hiking trails, hot springs and waterfalls (of which we experienced all three!). Arriving at 5:30am in the city meant that we had an exceptionally early start to the day. Once we found a hostel & grabbed breakfast, we headed out on one of the many trails up the mountains. The Bellavista trail lived up to its name and offered quite stunning views as we made our way higher and higher.

Pretty soon, the rain that had “dampened” our Cuyabeno jungle tour decided to follow us and “rain on our parade” (ok, I’ll stop with the puns now..) for the duration of our hike. It wouldn’t have been so terrible except for the fact that we got a tad lost and ended up walking for more than an hour necessary. With the help of some friendly locals, we eventually found our way to Cafe de Cielo – a cool restaurant overlooking all of Baños.

Connected to this restaurant was a luxury boutique hotel (with rooms starting at $300 per night!) where they called us a cab so that we wouldn’t have to hike the now mud-slicked path down to town. #moneywellspent

After a lovely afternoon siesta, we made our way (quite literally down the street) to the hot springs: Termas de la Virgen. For only $3 per person (plus $0.50 for a mandatory bathing cap) guests can spend endless hours submerging themselves in the natural hot springs that flow from the Tungurahua Volcano that borders Baños.

The hottest of the baths cools only 4°F from where it exits the volcano to a scorching ~117°F. I’ll admit that I couldn’t even dip my toes in the water at first, but after a quick dip in the “cooler” hot spring, I managed to slightly acclimatise myself to the heat and was able to submerge for longer than 2 seconds. There’s actually a 5 minute limit for the hottest pool. But many bathers use the cold pools nearby to cool off and bring their body temperature down to normal again quickly so that they can enter the pool sooner.

We stayed at the hot springs until our pruney fingers & toes signalled that we should head out. That night saw an early bed time for us (remember, we had been up since 5:30am!), but it meant that we were well rested for our biking tour the next day! (Post coming up soon!)