¿Donde estan los Baños?

On Monday we arrived in the picturesque little town of Baños (so named for its thermal baths) which is basically a valley surrounded by mountains and a volcano which forced out all the inhabitants only being allowed to return sometime in the 80s (I think!). As luck would have it we picked a great hostel run by a very friendly British guy and his Ecuadorian wife, also a spider fanatic, a hobby which fortunately was contained to his living area. Within our first few hours we wandered the streets, met a psycho gringo who owned a small cafe with a book exchange and made it quite clear that our books would not be up to the supreme quality of her collection if we so wished to exchange them and tried the teeth breaking local speciality toffee-I forget the name-oh and visited the church which is famous for its traffic accident-themed artwork. Interesting if not slightly morbid. We also cooked our first meal of the trip and shock horror it was a success (vegetable stir fry and flour tortillas-could hardly go wrong and if it had, the well chosen Chilean wine would have taken our minds off it!!) On Tuesday we set off with some mountain bikes from our hostal on the road to Puyo which is the jump off point for the Oriente and the Ecuatorian jungle. It is about 65km in all and I´m pretty sure we almost made it until it started raining pretty badly so we gave up. Not because we were tired or anything.... Anyway the scenery was stunning and we saw a couple of nice waterfalls-one in particular named "The Devil´s Cauldron" and got to traverse them in a basket thingy hanging off a cable. Sounds safe right? Well it was-we saw them taping up the cable just before we left. Oh and Baños has the softest bread we have seen so far so with Ari´s very smart purchase of a bottle of mustard we were sorted for lunch for a few days.
Wednesday we took it easy because it was hot (not because we were sore from the bike ride) and hiked (mustard in tow) up to Bellavista-Baños´ own mirador where it becomes clear just how isolated Baños really is. As we pondered our descent a woman came around the corner holding a medium sized dog and began spinning it around in circles. After a few enquiries we discovered that the people from the neighbouring hacienda had given him rat poison and she was attempting to make him vomit. We tried to help as she force-fed him oil, warm milk and then spun him round (a week later we realised that if only there had been a Polleria nearby we would have been sorted!) but generally felt helpless. Eventually a taxi arrived and they went off to the vet. We chose to believe the dog survived as I sincerely hope he did-I tried to find out exactly where the evil neighbours lived (my anti-malarial induced aggression was still in full flow) but failed. Two more successful meals and a wild night out in Baños later (well as wild as they get!) we said our goodbyes.