There is only one bus out of Chugchilan - which is scheduled to leave around 5:00 am - so we were up before the sun, equipped with our packed breakfast waiting in the freezing cold for the bus. When I say waiting for the bus, I mean waiting for the bus driver to wake up and let us in the bus, which he didn't do until about half an hour after the scheduled departure time.
So we returned to Latacunga in the dark trying to doze on the bumpy roads. Back to the Hotel Cotapaxi, but this time in a noisy back room that stank of stale cigarette smoke. We'd had a quite demanding few days physically on the Quilatoa loop and decided to have a quiet recovery day in Latacunga and get some of our "jobs" done. These included putting our washing in, buying small padlocks locks for our day packs, finding someone (eventually a tailor) to repair a tear in my cargo pants and in my day pack and shaving for the first time on the trip - which was not a minor chore with only a small pair of fingernail scissors and one bluntish razor.
In the evening we had dinner at an Italian restaurant that had been recommended to to us - having severely overordered because we had expected much smaller portions at the low prices and listening to a "busking" pipe flutist playing "el condor pase" - which we hadn't got sick of quite yet.
The next morning we headed back to the bus terminal with the intention of travelling direct to Banos - however we convinced by a ticket seller that it was best to take his bus to Ambato that was leaving in a few minutes then simply pick up a connection there to Banos. The connection didn't turn out to be that simple however as the station to Banos was on the other side of the city and we needed to take a taxi across town to connect and the price of the taxi was as much as the bus ticket had been.
Still we got a look at the city while travelleing in the taxi and were quite suprised to see a "dog hairdresser" store along the way. All the dogs we had seen so far were straggly looking underfed mutts - so it was hard to imaging that in such a relatively poor country there would be any demand for dog hairdressers. However we realised that the way we were travelling we on only came across the poorer sections of the community and there was no doubt a wealth upper class.
We arrived in Banos and thought it amazingly beautiful. It is very tourist oriented and thus quite "wetsernised" in its main streets - but it is a wonderful place lying in a valley on a river (Rio Verde I think ??) and get's it name from the (mainly) hot natural baths and spas that surround it.
We booked into a very nice little hostal (with free internet) and then headed out for a walk. We decided to clime up to a lookout called "Bellavista" and then on to another "marador runtun". It was quite steep and tested my injured knee but the view from the top was magnificent and worth the effort. We set a fairly brisk pace as we had been warned it was dangerous to go up there after dark
