Baños: part 2

I was also going to say, there´s a big church in town, and they have so many services! Practically one every hour. We wanted to visit the church (apparently there´s a church museum of things people have donated to the church because they´ve experienced some miracle and were healed after years of being incapacitated), and when we got there, the church was actually full! And people looked like they were in serious prayer/having a religious moment! Not that I expected all the people in a tourist town to be heretics, but I didn´t expect them to be THAT religious (to have mass every hour and for the church to be reasonably full every time). Anyway, here´s a picture of the church. The funny thing is, at night, the church is all lit up, and it looks like a disco from far away. So we called it the disco church. Church by day, disco by night, where you can get down with Jesus! Here´s a photo. Sorry if it´s not very clear, but you get the idea (it took me a while to work out the appropriate lighting required, and in the end I sort of got it. I could´ve taken a better picture but after standing there for 10 minutes, I couldn´t be bothered anymore).Oh, there´s also a volcano near Baños (it´s called Tungurahua, and it´s active). Here´s a map of the town.
As you can see, it´s really close to the town, and if it erupted, it would probably be devastating. But the people of Baños have thought of everything. In case of an eruption, they´ve marked on the roads the direction in which to run. I thought it was awesome! (In a lonely planet book (or some other travel book) that one of the german volunteers had, it also said which direction to run in order to get the best view of the volcano while running away from it! The ultimate touristy gesture!) I´m not sure where we´re supposed to run to though, because from the map above, it looks like the whole town is within the volcano´s eruption range. Maybe the town has some sort of shelter or something...

Baños: part 1

I was in Baños for the weekend. It´s about 4 hours south of Quito by bus, and it is the ultimate tourist town! I have never been anywhere more touristy in my life! There are probably 8000 inhabitants in this town, and I would say that a great majority of them exist solely for the tourists. In the main streets, every second building is a hostel/hotel, and the other buildings are tour operators. They all offer the same things- horse riding, quad biking, white water rafting, canyoning, bicycle hire, mountain climbing and trekking. The trekking varies from operator to operator, and you can go to the jungle or to the mountains. Most offer visits to the Quichua and/or Shuar Indigenous villages (how exotic!). Quichua is the other major language in Ecuador, they´re the predominant Indigenous peoples.

Baños is really different from Quito. For one thing, the streets are actually clean! The buildings in the main tourist streets are really colourful, clean and generally attractive. But once you move away from the tourist area (even a few streets away), the houses and buildings start looking a bit shabby and drab.

Here´s some street vendors, selling random touristy stuff (in the tourist strip)

And this is outside the tourist strip (about 2 streets away). The houses are more ´normal´ looking here (normal for Ecuador).

Baños is so touristy there´s even several of these train thingys running around town. I was surprised to see one, let alone three! The other ones were Flintstones and a strange caterpillar.

Ok, I´m going to create another post, lest this one gets too long and cumbersome.