Pictures are below

I am happily tired today, but I will get to that later.

I finished my tour of Cuenca, deciding it was better just to know the city well than take day trips. I also spent a lot of money of gifts. However, I am now free of gift buying obligation because everyone has a gift. Not everyone in the world, but everyone I was buying for. Now, if I want to buy something, I don´t have to, and shopping has become fun again. I can´t spend too much because I want enough leftover money to go to MN. I do have budgetted plenty of money to live off for the next few months, but having a little more when I get back to the states will be good.

I met up with Couchsurfer Lorena and her roomate. I don´t have a working cell phone in Ecuador, so we made plans to meet up at night. I was looking at her as I passed thinking , is that her? I passed because if it wasn´t her, the person would have been really confused. They came up to me a few minutes later and we laughed over the matter. We went to dinner and talked for a bit. They are studying environmental engineering, so that was a common topic. Then I asked what kinds of typical foods I needed to try while in Ecuador.

Speaking of food, if people want to worry about me, they should worry about my very risky eating habits. I love street food. It´s good and it´s cheap. However, more people get sick off street food than restaurant food. My stomach is pretty solid though after surviving two years in Honduras.

So, after Cuenca, I headed to Baños. In the guide it said it was really touristy but it reminds me of a sleepy little town. The first day I just walked around a bit. I didn´t do too much.

Today, I rented a bike. Now, when I first got on the bike it was really scary because I hadn´t been on a bike in 9 years. The trip to Puyo is 60km and almost all downhill. However, if you don´t trust speed on a bike, you break constantly. Not helping the fact was that it was lightly raining on and off. I was amazed though how fast I did get to the different points.

The area I biked in is a river valley and has a lot of waterfalls, which means a lot of stops. The best falls is 10km from town and the whole river drops about 100 feet or more. I am really bad at judging distances, so it might have been a bigger drop. You get there and it´s amazing the power of the water and how wet it is because it is spraying up from the bottom. Then you can go into a little cavelike passage and actually get behind the water fall. You get really wet doing it but it is worth it.

Now, at this point I realized I forgot my bike helmet on my bike and anywhere else in the world it would have been robbed. Luckily, it was still there. Now, most people on bikes went back at this point, but I went on. It was a good and bad decision because the weather didn´t improve and I was tired. I did manage another 8 km, making a total of 15 miles riding. Like I said, it was almost all downhill which made it easier.

I got back and got dry. And now I am trying to upload a ton of pictures, so I hope you appreciate them.

Jill