At the base of a very active volcano: Banos

So we got to Banos (on doritos and ice creams, and coke of course) in the early afternoon, 3pm I think. We first went to a lookout over the small town. The guidebook basically describes it as a horrid place. "The town itself, with drab architecture, garish tours and over crowded backpacker-ghetto feel". But we liked it and didn't get a backpacker-ghetto feeling from it at all. Yes it has a lot of tour outlets but there's also a lot of lolly shops with people making candy by throwing it over the hook on the doorstep.
It was at this point I felt the lonely planet Ecuador book had been the biggest waste of money. It's 4 years old and so out of date it isn't funny. So yeah,  probably don't buy any guide books on developing countries that are more that 2 years old. Things just change too fast. Use Google and blogs instead.
We were told there was a warning for a possible eruption from volcan Tungurahua, a volcano that erupts about four times a year. We had the option of having guinea pig for dinner, but they looked like they had been cooking all day and were expensive so we passed.

The next morning we went and hired some mountain bikes and started the ride to Puyo. Banos is known for having many, many waterfalls and there are a lot on this road. The first one we stopped at was not that far from town, and I took the cable car across the canyon to it while Brandon took the zip line. There's no carabiners here, just some tape like robe wrapped around the bar holding him to the zip line. We stopped at another large waterfall and both took the cable car across to it. There are heaps of zip lines along the canyon, they do cost a lot more than the cable cars. The ride was beautiful, so many small waterfalls and lovely scenery in general. The road follows the canyon and where the road goes through tunnels there are roads build out on the edge for bikes, so you get to pass through the small towns as well. By the way, everyone says the ride is pretty much downhill. Which it is, but there are a few hills that are pretty tough. Especially with bikes that have basically no gears. We ended our bike ride at Rio Verde where the most impressive falls are Pailon del Diablo. Since the guide book was written, the walk around the falls has been divided between two brothers and you can no longer pass under the back of the falls. You need to pay to see each side, since a brother owns each side. We only went to one side of the falls, the less popular side. After some lunch and an awesome banana and chocolate empanada, we went to find a truck to take us back to Banos. The guide book says you can catch a bus from anywhere along the way. Wrong. We found 2 very disheartened Canadian guys who said they had been waiting an hour because the truck would not leave until it had 3 passengers. They were also told is would be 2 dollars. Apparently it would be 2 dollars each if another 3 people after us turned up but it was 3 dollars to leave now. I call lies on that because there was no way 3 more bikes were fitting in...

Pailon del Diablo

When we got back to Banos we decided to go for a walk to see where the river comes out of the mountain. That would have been lovely, but after 2 hours of walking steadily uphill, I very much did not care where the water came from and needed the bathroom. So we took a detour to a weird cafe and hostel (I really don't think anyone had ever stayed there, it was 2 hours from town, down a muddy horse track and across the river in a home made metal chair cable thing). I really don't know why Diego didn't tell us how far it was. Maybe it was some joke, "hey guys guess how far those stupid Australians walked up the mountain before giving up!" I was far from laughing, I wanted to punch someone. I am hoping in the future I can look back on it fondly or maybe I will have forgotten about it. On the slightly plus side, I rescued a chicken from near death and we got to see the volcano spitting heaps of black smoke (we were much closer to it after our 2 hour walk to nowhere).
When we got back to town, we bought a few snacks and got in the car to go back to Quito. Just after we left town we even heard a little explosion from the volcano.