Next morning was a very early start and we retraced our steps in motorised canoe and by bumpy pot-holed road to Puyo. Here we stopped to see balsa-wood carvings being made (by hand) and painted. From there we followed "La Ruta de Las Cascades" (the road of the waterfalls) that snakes parallel to the Rio Pataza canyon from Puyo in the Or¡ente (the Ecuador name for the Amazon jungle) at 950m to Baños in the central highlands at 1800m. We had lunch in Rio Verde (the Green River - village on river of the same name) of grilled trout, grilled on an outdoor griddle, with rice. This was followed by a hike down to "Pailon del Diablo" (the Devil´s Gorge) waterfall which could be viewed from a suspension bridge and/or tunnel that came out almost underneath the falls. Manto-de-la-Novia was our next waterfall stop with a tarabita, or open cable car, ride 500m across the gorge 100m up above the waterfall. Next we visited Agoyan our final waterfall before we arrived in the town of Baños, which sits in the foothills of the active volcano Tungurahua. On arrival our first task was to be given the emergency evacuation procedure in the event of an eruption - run like hell over the bridge across the river... This is a reality as the volcano erupted only last year destroying a little village on its slopes.

We spent a full free day in Baños and we hiked up the nearby mountains to La Virgen del Agua Santa, a viewpoint over the town, and then onto Bellavista, another viewpoint looking over the town from the other end. Since the name Baños means baths and it has thermal baths, we thought we would have a nice warm bathe to ease the aching muscles before bed. We ended up in a writhing soup of (mainly Latino) bodies sharing the murky-looking waters with more closeness than I´d intended to get with the locals. The baths here were not quite as appealing as those of Papallacta. Baños also means toilet and it would have been more appropriate in this case, although the murkiness of the water is due to the minerals it contains.

We spent our last two days visiting volcanoes. On our route out of Baños we stopped at San Martin (The Black Saint), a deep river gorge cut into lava from previous eruptions and the site of the most recent eruption where the village of Las Juntas was destroyed with only part of one hotel and one house remaining. Nearby was the meeting of two rivers - Rio Chamba from Volcan Chimborazo and Rio Patate from Volcan Cotopaxi - which became the Pataza river, which we had followed from Puyo. Stopping at Pelileo, a town famous for its jeans (and not so famous for its freakish manikins) and the Gardens of Benigno Velo in Ambato, where Cypress trees have been fashioned into all manner of figures such as Mickey mouse, Humpty Dumpty, Galapagos animals we then headed to the snow and ice-peaked volcano of Chimborazo - see Volcanos for more info.

Intro / Quito | Old Town/Equator/Market | Quitsato/Cuy/Hot Springs/Jungle | Puyo/Banos | Volcanos