Ecuador, Baños

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Trying my best not to sound too much like a travel guide... Baños is known as the gateway to the amazon and sits amongst lush green cloud forests, loads of waterfalls and a smoking volcano due to erupt any day. There's adventure sport tours everywhere, tons of hots baths, bars, restaurants and massage parlours. We partook in a bit of all of them. The best bit for me was mountain biking past 12 or so waterfalls stopping now and then to get closer, by means of a rickety cage suspended across a canyon and crawling through tight caves to get right behind another fall called the Pailon del Diablo. Canyoning (or abseiling down waterfalls as it should be called) was great fun too. Check out this video of our guide running down a rather large waterfall. Other highlights include, sitting in a old style box sauna, looking like the heads from Futurama; going out for a mate's birthday and being the only gringos to join over 100 locals at the volcanic baths. It's a hard life. [Tom]