Tips 👏
- It’s a small but quite busy thermal town.
- It’s very green, hence humid, bring rain clothes.
- There’s a lot of hotel, restaurants and tourism agency to explore around.
- It’s the adventure capital of Ecuador, zip-lines and bungee jump available.
🏠 Accommodation
We spread our stay in two different hotels:
- Luna Volcan Spa Resort for one night, more details below.
- Balcon del Cielo for three nights, cheap and comfy, a bit outside of the city but very good quality price ratio.
🚲 Getting there
Ecuador Hop from Cotopaxi on a day tour, arrived at 3PM.
⏱ Duration
We stayed four nights and felt that was perfect.
Luna Volcan Spa Resort 🏛
Being in a trip since 4 month, we decided to offer ourselves a relaxing night in the luxury Luna Volcan Spa Resort. Luxury because you can count 200£/night, quite off the budget, a little caprice if you may.
We went in this resort since it’s part of the things to do in Baños, because it’s located on the side hills, with thermal pools overlooking the city, creating a very unique view day and night. The fare included a nice dinner, breakfast, and unlimited access to the pools area, perfect for chilling during a day. We spent the end of the afternoon alternating in the four different pools, to then get lunch and enjoy a big night of sleep.
Note that you can enjoy the pool area as a visitor, for 66$/person. There’s also a massage center and two little restaurants.
Pailon del Diablo 😈
A day after our SPA retreat, we were supposed to do the Pailon Del Diablo tour with Ecuador Hop, starting at 9AM. They messed with the pick-up so that didn’t happened, but they gave us the money back.
Frustrated, we decided to try to go by ourselves, when a Chiva (chavy minibus with loud music) approached us in the center and proposed us to get there for 3$/person, which we agreed to. After getting more ecuadorian tourists in the bus, we started the tour, cheesy music on, at 10:30AM.
Our first stop was at 11AM, where the Chiva dropped us on a tiny road on top of a cliff. We took some pictures of the canyon, appreciated the forest of waterfalls, and try to see the shape of JC face in a rock. After what, we carried on to the second stop, which was essentially an adventure center with multiple ziplines, monkey bridge and other adrenaline attractions. As brave people we didn’t do any of those, but some of the other tourists in the group did and that looked pretty fun. Few minutes of Chiva later, we did another adventure stop, which was again the DIY version of a tele cabin. For 2$/person, we could board the basket and get closer of a huge waterfall (very high too).
Post-adrenaline, we boarded back the Chiva to the Pailon Del Diablo for an extra 10 minutes. Upon arrival, we paid 2$ to get in, and started a little hike of 10 minutes. On the way, we passed by a scary suspension bridge, to arrive at the top of the super impressive waterfall. The cool thing is we saw it from the top, while being able to get super close to it. We saw there was also another path below, but we didn’t had time to get to it. We then made our way back to the Chiva which brought us back to the city in 20 minutes.
