linea zero hot springs

I finally have some time on my hands so I can try to update this thing, but its nice to know that the lack of entries has been missed by at least a few people. Since the first entry I have been really busy and have been to two pretty neat places so I´ll start with the first and go from there...

So the house and the nearby town did have electricity which was nice, and most of the time there was running water as well. We got off the bus on the main highway, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and hired someone with a truck to drive us the 8 kilometers up to the house. The road left something to be desired, especially when you are precariously perched in the back of a truck with, i think I counted thirteen other people. There was at least 3 or 4 times where we had to ford creeks, however the scenery was nice.

We were in a large very lush valley with lots of cacao and banana plantations, and all around us were green mist covered mountains. The only really ugly part about it was the fact that in the river there were several excavators making dikes along the banks. What was probably a pretty nice clean river now looks like a dirty rock filled canal, but I guess they can have some serious flooding problems at times which isn't good for the cacoa growing business. Fortunately the hot springs were way above all this.

The house we stayed in was fairly nice compared to the standards I have gotten used to living where i live in the city. I guess someone in my organization knew the owner and so for the last several years they have taken the group of german students who come here every summer to teach music to stay there for the weekend. Basically whenever they want to go they just have to give him a bit of notice and he gives them the keys. Anyways it has 4 double beds upstairs and a cooking-eating area downstairs, way nicer, brighter, and cleaner than i am used to.
We organized for the same guy who drove us to the house to come back the next day and drive us up to the hot springs, which were another 45 minutes farther up the road.

They turned out to be some of the nicer hot springs I have been to. The pool was a fairly good size and some people who have a house near by cleans up the garbage regularly so they were clean as well (the same people also charge 50 a head for their services). The best part however, was that there was a nice clean and cold stream that ran right beside them, so you could hop back and forth from the cold to hot water. Personally I enjoyed the cold water more than the hot, as even though it was cloudy and we were far from the coast, it was still plenty warm that day.

The part about the people cleaning up the garbage is important, because most (there are lots of people who aren´t like this) of the people here don´t understand the concept of throwing garbage in the garbage, and instead throw it wherever they feel like it. It can be really frustrating to see this and I have given the 11 year old nephew of my family s--t a few times when he just tossed his garbage out the window or into the river. The stuff that has annoyed me about ecuador could fill up quite a few entries, but maybe i´ll save them for another time.

Anyways that was basically the weekend. You should be able to see the pictures on facebook, if not now then fairly soon. It was a lot more exciting at the time because at the time I had still not been to the Sierra where I was last weekend, and to me at least, that made the place I have just written seem pretty dull by comparison...