Living in Banos and Playing Librarian in Salasaca

A view of the Rio Pastaza Gorge from the Banos zoo

Sorry it has been so long since my last post. I got a little caught up in my life in Banos and couldn´t find myself in the right mood to post.

Anyways though, its been a fun two weeks. Easter weekend was great and involved a lot of partying for most of us there. For most of the Ecuadorians there however, it was a religious time, as Banos is known to be a very sacred place. During the weekend of Holy Week, people walk over 20 miles from Ambato to the church in Banos where they ask the Virgin of the Holy Water for special requests.

Hanging out on the rooftop terrace of my hostel in Banos during Easter weekend

The Monday following Easter I decided to check out a volunteer opportunity in an indigenous town called Salasaca, located about 40 min. by bus from Banos. I arrived in the morning, was introduced to the other volunteers, then shown the project they were hoping I would help with. The project pretty much involved being the librarian for the library they had in town. Basically they had three bookshelves of books that were not organized in any way besides by language. Needless to say, I spent the better part of the following week busing to Salasaca from Banos and doing my best to catalog and organize the library. It was not the most exciting thing in the world, but I was glad to at least be of some help to the community.

The library in Salasaca I was helping with



The bookshelves in the library after my attempt to organize them

Throughout the week, along with working in the library, I also found some time to enjoy hanging out in Banos. I spent a good bit of time in the local coffee shops practicing my spanish and doing some reading. I found an apartment to rent for the week from a lovely family that owned a restaurant next to the hostel I stayed at during the weekend. The apartment was about a 10 min. walk from the main part of town, but really nice and quiet and turned out to be a great place to spend my time in Banos. Another plus was that the family I was renting from was so wonderful that they regularly invited me to their family dinners at the restaurant.

Along with studying spanish and hanging out with my friends, I also did a few other fun activities in town. One day my friends Andy and Megan and I all went to do a zipline across the Pastaza river gorge. It turned out to be a lot more fun than expected and was different than other ziplines I´d done because we were attached at our backs, so you flew across the river superman style. Well worth the 6 bucks.

Megan and Andy as we head across the river to do the zipline

Me supermaning it across the Rio Pastaza

By the end of the week my foot was feeling a lot better and I decided it was time to try and do something more active. My first activity of choice was of course to go kayaking. So after talking to my friends at Geotures (the company I worked for last time I was in Banos) I arranged to borrow a boat and join them on one of their rafting trips. We ran the lower Rio Pastaza, a run that I worked on lots last time I was in town. I was amazed to see how much the river had changed over the last few years. The earthquakes (one of which I felt one morning in my apartment) and the rainstorms over the years made some big changes to the river bed.

After a morning on the river, I told my Ecuadorian friend Chamy that I had been wanting to visit the local zoo, which I had heard was actually pretty nice. He offered to go there with me and be my own personal tour guide. I gladly accepted his offer and we were off the the zoo. It was a pretty nice zoo, all things considered, and I got to see lots of animals that I have never seen before, including Jaguars and Pumas. The difference in this zoo from other zoos Ive visited is just how close you can get to the animals. A wire fence was pretty much the only thing between you and the animal, and most of the time the gap in the fence was wide enough to stick your hand through. The monkeys were especially excited about this, and would reach through the fences to try and grab your hand or steal things out of your purse if you weren´t watching. One of the craziest things though was the bear enclosure. One of the official tour guides opened up one of the gates and let us walk out on to this platform above the bears. The crazy part about it was that the platform did not even have railings across the whole thing. Meaning that one wrong step could have easily sent you down into the pit with the bears. All I could think of while standing on that platform looking down at the bear just 5 feet below me trying to climb one of the gates to get out, was of that event at the San Fransisco zoo just months ago when the lion got out and killed some visitors. Luckily, the bears never escaped and I managed to get out of the zoo unharmed.

A Jaguar relaxing in the zoo

One of the many monkeys that were running around freely in the zoo

My favorite animal I saw at the zoo (although ironically I cant remember what it was called)

The bear enclosure at the zoo (notice the openess of the platform just to the left of the girls)

On Sunday I decided that I would head out of Banos with my new friends Andy, Jeong-Mi and Monica, who were all on their way to Quito. I did not know exactly what my plans were at that point, but I was feeling ready to leave Banos for a bit and felt it would be most fun if I left with friends. Once we arrived into Quito, Monica headed to Mindo (a nearby cloudforest) and the rest of us checked into a hostel. The last few days in Quito ended up being really nice, mostly spent relaxing and checking out the city a bit. Each night we took turns cooking dinner for each other and played silly games that I had not played in forever, like Monopoly and Jenga.

One morning we all headed to the Basillica, a church with two huge towers that you can climb some steep sketchy stairs up and get a view of the whole city. It ended up being pouring down rain and lightening the whole time we were there, making the scaling of the towers all the more sketchy.

Andy and I at the top of the Basillica

Yesterday Andy, Lea (a German friend from the hostel) and I all took a visit to the men´s prison in Quito. Last time I was in Quito I visited the women´s prison and found it extremely interesting so I was looking forward to seeing what the men´s prison was like. After finally making it inside (there were lots of long lines of women wanting to get inside to visit their husbands) we were led up and down the floors of the prison in search of the person who´s name I had written down from the internet to visit. Eventually we discovered that that person was actually in a different section of the prison, so instead we ended up talking with Fred Murphy, a 59 year old man from London who is in prison for trafficing drugs. He had some pretty interesting stories to tell us about life in the men´s prison in Quito and took us a on a little tour of the place. Like the women´s prison, the men´s prison is an open cell prison, meaning that during the days the prisoners roam freely wherever they like. There are pool tables, restaurants, convenient stores, etc. inside and the cells are more like dorm rooms, with pictures covering the walls and Tvs in most. If you are ever in Quito, I definitely recomend visiting the prison, its a pretty sureal place that you will definitely not find in any guidebook.

This morning I said goodbye to Andy and Jeong-Mi who left for Columbia to continue on with their travels, as well as Monica, who headed back to the US this afternoon. Tonight I am planning to go to dinner and a movie with a couple of German girls who I met in the hostel.

My travels are about to get a lot better since Heather is flying in to Quito tomorrow night! I am so excited for the next two weeks of traveling around Ecuador together. We have lots of great adventures planned and I have a feeling its going to turn out to be an amazing couple of weeks. More stories and pictures to come!