Camping in Baños

This past weekend was one big adventure. Jenny and I tagged along with our host brothers outing club for a weekend trip to Baños. Baños is a cute touristy town in the mountains close to the tungurahua volcano. Its filled with shops that sell sugar cane toffee and pieces of sugar cane to munch on. We got there at around 10:30 by bus and left our stuff at the firestation because my host brother was friends with the fire fighters. Then we hired a pick up truck to carry all 15 of us to waterfalls where we would be hiking. Driving with all of us piled in the back of the pick up truck through the mountains around Baños was amazing! Everything was lush green and the weather was perfect. We hiked around two waterfalls that were incredbly powerful. When I can figure out how to put some pictures up here I will. That night, we camped out half an hour outside the city up in the mountains. However, at about 7:30 the leaders of our group were conflicted about whether to pay someone to drive us up to our campsite then and set up camp before going out for the night, or whether we should just go out and set up camp when we get back at 1 am. Thank goodness the problem was solved by the firefighters. They offered to drive us up to our campsite for free... IN THE FIREFIGHTERS AMBULANCE! so all 13 of us piled into the ambulance and drove on rocky mountain roads up to our campsite in the dark. It was terrifying. but we made it safely to our campsite, which by the way, was on the slopes of the active volcano, Tungurahua. We slept in the site where they collect seismic data on the volcano. After we set up camp, we went back into town in the ambulance and went to the thermal baths and had dinner and went out dancing until about 12:45. By that point, we were exhausted. We traveled back to our campsite in the back of a pickup truck and huddled to keep warm in the chilly night air. Jenny and I shared a two person tent and barely got any sleep. Between the Ecuadorians talking rather loudly and the cows that came by and nudged our tent in the middle of the night, we maybe got about 4 hours of sleep. We were up at 6:45 to pack up and catch a bus into town. I could finally see the road we had taken twice to the campsite! Once we got into town we had breakfast and started the day{s adventure: repelling. Repelling is a lot like rock climbing in that you{re wearing a harness attatched to a rope except you only go down. I had done this before in Israel and I thought that repelling meant that you just sort of walk down the side of a mountain while attatched to a rope. Well, Ecuadorians seem to think that it means lowering yourself down from hights but whithout anything to put your legs on, you{re just sort of dangling in the air and lowering yourself down. The first thing that we repelled off was a bridge where tourists were bungee jumping from. Our fearless leaders set up their equipment on the bridge and showed us how to lower ourselves down. and i did it! The scariest part was climbing over the railing of the bridge... But that was nothing compared to the next place we went to repell: a waterfall!! It was amazing! I lowered myself down a rope with waterfalling all around me, getting soaking wet. It was truly a beautiful experience. It was actually a very appropiate way to spend rosh hashana, marveling in the wonders of God{s creation in a tropical rainforest. shanah tovah!