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In Cajas national park, with the prehistoric alien landscape.

What is this mysterious gloop? A new species of slime mold? An example of bacterial-fungi symbiosis? Jess solved the mystery by sticking her finger into the mess, licking it off and pronouncing it as peach jello.

Sad state of inca ´ruins´ outside of the Banco Central museum, which was very cool. Lots of shruken heads which the museum brochure was very excited about proclaiming as the main attraction.
Jess and Brian
Corey about to jump over a stream in Cajas. It was very cold.

Baños has this litte catacombs city area, with its own streets. From the mountain we climbed (yes, mountain. We climbed a whole mountain. It started off as two trails and us randomly pickin one, and then being too proud/dumb to turn back, even when we were scrambling up slopes of almost 90-degree angles), we had a nice view of the whole city, including this funeral procession.
CUYCUYCUYCUY GET YOUR CUY CRISPY BROWN AND FRIED. I actually think cuy is pretty okay, I just got a little tired of eating it the last time I was here in Esperanza. Corey is going to try cuy before we leave, even if it´s the last thing he eats, dammit.
In front of the hot baños (baths) of Baños. If you love screaming little kids with huge floaties bigger than their torsos attached to their arms and little old ladies who for some reason put on their bathing suits backwards so you get lots of wonderful shriveled balloon old lady boobies floating in the water near you, then you would love these baths! They were really relaxing and nice and brown and minerally. It was fun switching from the boiling hot to the freezing cold pool. It made your toes tingle. We all slept like dead burros that night.

View of the city from the mountain.
La Virgen. The trail began as stairs leading to her, and then afterwards it was just us, the bugs, plants and glorious muddy steepness.

The stations of the cross on the stairs leading up to La Virgen.

Downhill trail coming back down the mountain. We hiked up to the little town of Runtun, which was more like a community of scattered farmhouses than a town. It was too cloudy to see the peak of the volcano whose name I can never say, Tungurahua. It last erupted two years ago, the last time I was here, foiling me from visiting Baños then.
Mushrooms! Pollo del bosque! Polyporus sulphureus! That took a long time for me to type out correctly and it made Corey annoyed with my slow scientific name typing skills!


Thinking about the yummy mushrooms, soon to be in my belly the next day when we get back to Quito.

Wow, why are the Cuenca photos all the way down here? Never mind. Cuenca is a pretty city and has a nice river. Too bad the air is still dirty.

Corey imitating me tweaked out on pseudoephedrine. This is right when I was starting to feel a bit icky, a couple of hours before I puked on the streets outside our hostel. The guilty culprit is suspected to be a cheese sandwich, consumed in the bus station of Riobamba.
Amaranth, growing on the river banks of Cuenca.


Goodbye, Baños! You were a very pretty, nice, good city, worthy of many positive English 101 adjectives. Back to Quito now.