21/06/2019 - Banos, Ecuador

We woke up and Josh bought some coffees and brought them to our room, whilst I booked some accommodation for us in our next destination, Cuenca, which we will travel to tomorrow. We spoke to Dan, Joshs brother who lives in Ukraine, and also caught up with Trudie and Pete. Joshs' cousin moved her wedding forward so that Uncle Mike could be present for it, so they had done that yesterday. I think Mike went in his pijamas, but at least they got to spend the day together!

We got up slowly again, another rainy day here (I guess the name Banos or bathroom really is a clue as to how much water there is here!) We had cereal, juice and coffee in the hostel kitchen and then finished getting ourselves together. We walked a few blocks up the road to a hostel that provides laundry service and dropped a bag of clothes off. Then we went to the bus station, a few blocks in another direction and sorted out our bus tickets for our travel to Cuenca tomorrow. We stopped off in a café called honey and shared a sandwich before walking round the corner to catch the public bus. The bus was at the stop waiting when we got there, and so we hopped straight on. We were amongst mostly locals with bags of fruit and veg that I guess they had come to the town for, and kids who had just finished school for the day. Departure time was supposedly 14:00 but was in reality 14:20 in true South American style. We rode up the windy mountainous roads for about 45 minutes until we got the ‘casa del arbol’. It is basically a tree house and some big swings over the edge of a mountain, that supposedly has great views across the valley and of the volcano opposite. Sadly for us it was a complete white out due to the dreary weather. When we got to the swings someone was lying in the mud just coming round from either a fit or a faint, they managed to get up with some help from their group so we left them to it. Even without the view the swings are quite scary, there is a kind of launch pad, you get strapped in and then some guys who work there fling you about in them! It was too wet to play with the camera properly, but it was good fun all the same! We had a go on the zip line that was there and went for a little stroll where we saw a really cool long tailed red and green bird (think it might be a ‘slaty tailed trogan’ after a quick Google) and a hummingbird in the beautiful flower garden. There was a café and we saw people having corn on the cob with cheese and I wandered if they had meant to order the hot chocolate and cheese and had done the same mistake as we had a few days earlier, it did make us chuckle! We left and caught the bus back into town. We walked passed the café honey again, so stopped for a coffee and snack. Refuelled, we then went to find somewhere for Josh to get his eyebrows waxed. We ended up in a tiny cupboard of a shop, Josh had to lay down on a fold out bed that was so small his knees were basically under his chin. The place could have done with a few disinfectant wipes here and there, but on the other hand was very cheap! We popped to the supermarket to buy some food to make dinner with then went back to our hostel. We had a yoga class in the hostel, and were the only two that had signed up for it so basically had our own little private lesson, it was great! Such a nice little Peruvian lady teaching us, and she just about managed to translate her class into English for us too. After yoga we cooked ourselves some dinner, veg and rice noodles. We collected our laundry that had been delivered to the hostel for us and then went to our room where we video called Marky and Goldie who have come to South America to visit us and landed in Lima this evening! We had a quick shower, packed some of our things up, and got ourselves into bed.