carnival

I am currently in a touristic town in the Andes called baños, and in about half an hour we´re scheduled to take a 3 hour tour that stops at five or six different waterfalls, so i´ll have to write quick. Have been really busy ever since last saturday since last weekend was the festival of carnival here, meaning that the monday and tuesday were holidays and almost everyone goes either to the beaches or to a few different cities in the mountains that have parades etc.. I decided to take adavantage and took the whole week off to travel.
I started saturday by going to a beach on the north coast with a group of people from guayaquil and two canadian girls who are doing an internship in the embassy in quito. The nightlife was good but the beach wasn´t anything special and there was way to many people so I decided to head back to Ambato where I was the weekend before. Most of the people I was with had to go back to work or study on wednesday so they stayed at the beach while me and one other girl from brazil left for the mountains. We took an overnight bus that was supposed to get us into Quito by 8am and from there it is just another 2 hours to Ambato, however due to some heavy rain there was a landslide that made the road impassable, so sometime in the night we had to stop and wait for them to clear it up. We didn´t get going again until 10 or 11 the next morning and by then there was a massive line up of buses and other traffic all waiting. Bad news for us but good news for the few people who lived in the area as they made a killing selling any kind of food they had. It didn´t take them long to take advantage of the situation. Anyways as a result we didn´t get into Quito until 1 in the afternoon and didn´t get to Ambato until 5ish, just enough time for a quick shower at my friends place before going down to the city center to watch the parade. The streets were absolutely packed, apparently there were more people than normal because a lot of routes to the coast had been closed due to the rain so people from Quito went to the festival in Ambato instead. The parade was a toned down copy of the famous carnival in Rio de Janiero but it was entertaining none the less, however afterwards was when the party really started. Like I said the streets were completely full of people and almost everyone was armed with cannisters of foam to spray, so as soon as the last float of the parade passed the war began. It didn´t matter if you wanted to participate or not, everyone was fair game. A few cannisters later we headed to temporary bar that had been set up that charged 20$ to get in but once inside everything was free. By the end of the night they had run out of plastic cups so the tequila was distributed by the bartender standing on the bar and pouring the bottle into peoples open mouths. I was reminded of how a bird feeds its new born chicks in the nest. Anyways it goes without saying that overall it was a pretty good time.
We stayed with my friend once again last night and this morning took an hour bus ride here to baños, tonight we will probably go back to Ambato and stay with my friend once more and from there head out to the province and volcano of Cotopaxi. Apprently to summit it you need full mountain gear but the hike to a cabin about half way up is supposed to be fairly easy so thats what I hope to do tommorow.
Tommorow night we will most likely stay in Quito with the Canadian girl we met at the beach and from there make a few days trips to some touristic places close by, one of which is Mitad del Mundo, or middle of the earth which marks the Equator.
Anyways I am off to see some waterfalls