Banos

P4050114, originally uploaded by A Family On A Mission.

After leaving Quito we headed three hours away to a town called Banos, which Ceara kept saying,"It's funny that they called the city bathroom"! This town is right near an active volcano that steams and has lava that still comes out of it everyday. It exploded enough in 2006 that everyone in the city was evacuated and not allowed to return for quite awhile. Here is a picture of Travis and Ceara at one of the lookouts of the whole city of Banos. You supposedly can see the top of the volcano from there as well but it ended up being very cloudy that night so we couldn't see anything but the lights of the city. It was so cloudy that night that by the time the bus left to take us back down, we were actually in the clouds. That is a strange feeling being so high that you are in the clouds. During the Easter holiday that we were in Banos, a group of over 30,000 people walked from another town called Ambato to Banos as a procession for Easter. There were so many people that they closed the highway so that the people could walk overnight to the city and then have a special ceremony at the catholic church. We did see more people the next day but by the time we headed out to look around, most of them had left or gone to their hotels to sleep.
We also enjoyed going to a little fair, go-carting around the city and watching some crazy people bungy jump from the city bridge and enjoying some thermal pools that are heated by the volcano. It was a great little holiday for our family! Then we took a taxi truck from Banos back to Cuenca which took us 5 hours. We even took the back roads from Banos to Riobamba that had been washed out by the lava from the volcano explosion in 2006. It was crazy to see how much the volcano destroyed the country side, from houses, to trees to roads and even the river. Almost like I imagine it looks like on the moon. We did get to see a little video at the top of the lookout of the devastation right after it actually exploded. At least now the vegetation was growing back and houses were being cleaned up and the road was being reused. The only part about the trip is that it is very curvy roads going straight down that Ceara had some trouble keeping her breakfast down and by the time we got home, I was still feeling like I was moving back and forth.