We met this awesome couple that went to CSU!!! At the Cotopaxi hostel and decided to go to Baños with them. The guy, Valentine, is from Australia, but is Russian. When the hostel owner’s son found this out, he was soo excited and talked in Russian to him, gave him a ton of Vodka, and then gave us all these amazing deals – like we only had to pay $5 a night at the hostel, which was significantly cheaper.

We acted like my family on vacation when we hung out with them - all we did was eat. One day we made 12 tortilla pizza’s and about 26 crepes and ate ALL of it between the 4 of us. It was actually pretty impressive. The whole hostel kitchen was filled with our food. We used every pot, plate, cutting board, and pan to hold our food. Anybody who walked in was amazed that we could hog a kitchen as good as we did.

While there we told everyone we met that we were from Australia, and got this reputation of being crazy Australians – so many people in the town, including other foreigners knew us and said hi to us. Super funny and crazy. We met a bartender there who was good at dancing while making the drinks, he let me try to do the same as him - make a drink while dancing…it was harder than it looked.

From this night on, we only told people we were from Australia - excluding the Australian, British, and Americans who would know we were lying from our accent. It’s actually fun being “Australian” except I always forget the name of the “city I’m from” - Adelaide… and I realized I don’t know hardly anything about Australia, which works out most the time, because people will usually only say - O! there’s a ton of kangaroos there huh? But this one time, a Swedish couple asked us a ton of hard questions about the Australian education and work systems. Luckily, we had a true Australian - our friend Valentine - with us to teach us about our country.

While there, me and Reb went canyoning, which is repelling down waterfalls. We repelled down two, slide down one, and fell down the last one. It was probably one of the scariest things I’ve done. Each waterfall made us more and more scared that we wanted to quit, but these old people did it like it was nothing, so we definatly couldn’t chicken out. 

Baños was probably one of the one of the best, funnest cities.