Bikes in Baños, Sun in Canoa, Back home with Brady
Trip Start
Jun 12, 2005
1
30
40
Trip End
Ongoing
Baños, Canoa, Bahía,
Ecuador
Saturday, March 11, 2006
As a good friend would do, I let Brady fly into the dangerous port city of Guayaquil, get out of the Ecua-airport, to the Bus Terminal via a taxi driver who ripped him off for another few dollars since he is as Conan O´Brien-white-as-they-come, and four hours later, after a ¨long¨ 4-hour bus ride (what a pansy!) to Riobamba, I saw my child-hood friend in the Andes Mountains. WOE! The experience of greeting such a close-friend in such a different place was awesome.
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After many meetings and a fun talent show in Riobamba with my fellow volunteers we skipped over to the beautiful town of Baños situated in an Andes valley right under an active volcano. Being more explosive and active than Brady´s stomach issues during our travels, Peace Corps Volunteers have to get special permission to enter and stay in Baños from the bosses... it is an awesome place. With rafting, waterfall repelling, biking, abundance of great cafes and restaurants, cheap and clean hostals (with cable televisions!), and spectacular scenery, Baños is up there with Cuenca and the beach-town of Canoa as my favorite places here in Ecuador... (Message to Volunteers: I know I really need to travel the Coast more right.)
Saturday morning after only 4 hours of sleep from Salsa Dancing the night away, we decided to get on bikes and travel down the beautiful scenic roads as cars were dodging us on the crazy roads here. It is dangerous enough riding in buses here on these roads so why we decided to take bikes out with a few other volunteers is a good question. Nonetheless, we were having a great time cruising downhill through the beautiful valley when Brady´s chain broke less than a half-hour into the ride. We returned to a hostile business owner and I tried getting our money back. After being told that we were ¨bad-people¨ for asking for what we call a ¨refund¨ in the U.S., we decided to take another bike as that was the only option on the table other than walking away and spending another 5 dollars each on mountain bike rentals
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. Brady had intentions of ¨accidently¨ totaling them and-or never returning them. Before we could total the bike(s) and I could convince Brady (as a PEACE Corps volunteer would do ofcourse) that I would not be able to accompany him with his cruel idea of vandilism, Brady´s chain on the other bike broke again... We didn´t get far enough to absolutely and accidently total these bikes so we decided to walk back and go for another round of Iran-U.S. Nuclear Style Talks... So due to my ability to defuse the situation (riighhhhttt) by telling the owner that I am a Lonely Planet Guide Writer and that ¨I am going to write a bad review on your business (like they write bad reviews) if you don´t refund our money¨ we decided to return the second pair of bikes to the owners free-of-charge; therefore, by ¨Doing The Right Things¨ (Thank you Mountain View Elementary) we were free to go off to the coast as Brady and I anxiously awaited warm waters and some relaxful time from the salsa dancing, a 20-minute bike ride, repelling, restaurant (coughbar) hopping, and traveling that we have been up to for the last few days...After an over-night eight hour bus ride from Quito, we arrived to my home in Bahía. I introduced Brady to the surrounding areas, friends of friends, and the Peace Corps Motto of ¨Hang On Out¨. We did a good job of that and in between everything we did, we kept remembering and talking about what old friends talk about
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. We caught up on everything and pondered where we will be the next time we meet again. We talked about waking up on the crack of dawn every Saturday morning and playing some 2-on-2 basketball with his dad and brother at the gym. During the winding bus-rides through the Andes mountains we were reminded of his short 2-day commercial fishing interview with my dad when he was constantly sick and empty of insides. We went through some Indigenous strikes, we stopped by the Peace Corps Headquarters, he learned some Salsa, he ate some Shrimp Ceviche, he felt the absurdly warm waters, I scared him from street food, we talked politics, we went shopping for some running shoes in a mall where he forgot he was in a developing nation; he got a little taste of my integration but politely declined to see where I spend most of my working day. Everything we did seems so dull and boring in writing... probably because it was but wasn´t to us. He left back to his last few weeks of school and his first real engineering job in downtown SanDiego.. roughin' it... I continue this adventure without the familiarity that I enjoyed the last 8 days but with a new trust in how awesome this experience really is.
Enjoy the photos and videos as I can put them up. Any photos that are incriminating are Brady´s fault.
