I spent a few nights in Baños, an admittedly touristy town set in a flat valley between two steep green flanks of mountains.  It is an outdoors and activity center, a place for us tourists to congregate and spend our money on tours that are twice the cost of their companion tours in Asia.  I was at first underwhelmed.  The town lay under a sheet of clouds and heavy afternoon rains and there was little to do.  Add to the fact that I’d managed to lose the guidebook a friend lent me…something I was not (and am not) happy with myself about.

 

However, the clouds lifted (literally) on the third day and the weather was so nice that I had to postpone my planned departure for Tena and rent a bike.  I wasn’t thorough in checking the bike out before leaving for the 20km ride and found to my chagrin I was going to get an extra workout with the headwind and the back brake hugging tightly to the tire. Nevertheless, the road follows a winding path down the mountains past numerous waterfalls.  I stopped at the last major one, the Pailon del Diablo.

 

Here I took the time to hike down to the waterfall, a winding trail along a steep face of jungle vegetation.  At the end, one can climb up the ‘crack’ of the waterfall, a rock fissure to the right of the thundering cascade that is quite low and quite wet, but gets you up next to the waterfall itself.  A pretty cool experience, as well as crossing some of the swaying suspension bridges hung above the swirling imbroglo below.

 

That was the beginning of the sort of day I’ll look back on and smile about when I recall the halcyon of my youth.  Back to Baños, I made it in time to watch Dortmund crush Real Madrid in the midafternoon and then take in a windswept hike up to the statue of the virgin over town, affording a great view.    With these tasks finished, I left the next day on a bus to Tena, a steep descent from the highlands into the far fringes of the Amazon basin.  Tena is situated on the banks of the Napo river, which joins to form one of the Amazon’s larger tributary systems.

 

The first day was a short hop to Misahualli to see the monkey troupe patrolling the main square and nearly into the restaurant trying to steal food. I found the butterfly garden on the outskirts, built into a family’s yard.  An old shirtless grandfather with some good fillings toured me around while holding his 10-month old granddaughter, telling me the lifecycle of the various butterflies and showing me the specimens they had in various stages, including some cocoons that shone like gold.  It was both quite informative and very personal, one of only a handful of encounters with somewhat reserved locals I have had a role in.

 

Today was active too, finding the jungle reserve in town and punting across the river to it, where they had a bevy of rainforest creatures like capybaras, boas, pecari, some type of sleepy looking porcupine, a caiman, and a free-roaming coati and some monkeys in the trees.  The pecari, a type of wild pig, emit what was coined a disagreeable scent from their loins, as per the translation on the plaque, and when I was near them I couldn’t argue it.  There was also an army of ants trooping leaves back to their colony en masse, a pretty cool sight to behold. 

 

It’s funny how much things are the same the world over.  The foods, the bananas, oranges, mangos, star fruits, passionfruits are as ubiquitous here as I found them to be in Asia.  Walking down some of the dirt roads in the country I felt I could have just as easily been back.  Tomorrow the journey winds to its final destination: Quito.  In the cool highlands again.