Yes, it can be the word used to refer to the bathroom in Spanish, but it's also a town in Ecuador (properly called Baños de Agua Santa or baths of sacred water) known for the thermal baths....or baños. This city came highly recommended from several people. It's a big tourist destination for adventure seekers and it's also known as the gateway to the Amazon. For us, it was a short stay on our way to Cuenca.

We had three nights at a lovely B&B called The Magic Stone. We were warmly greeted by our host and shown our room and property. Maeve and Liam immediately were drawn to the dog...no surprise there. Maeve took an amazing picture of the dog which strongly warrants a repost.

Maeve and Liam relax on the hammocks behind our room

On our first day we walked around town to get the 'lay of the land.' We could easily walk all throughout the downtown. There were many quaint 'squares' with little parks.

Maeve and Liam enjoy a unique feature of one park

Once we knew our way around, we decided to visit one of the thermal bath pools. There are four pools and we decided to go to the one popular with the locals. It was just outside of town and we were clearly the only gringos there. Theses pools were quite different from the ones we visited in Costa Rica. They aren't as lavish, but they have more rules regarding showers and bathing caps. This took us a while to figure out, but we could rent caps for about 30 cents or we could buy them for three dollars...so we rented.

The pools to the left. Each one has a different temperature.

Baños is located on the side of volcano Tungurahua, the largest volcano in Ecuador (thus the thermal baths). It is known as 'the Black Giant' and its activity caused an evacuation in 1999/2000. It is still active and you can see smoke from it on occasion. You can't fully see the volcano from the city. Upon the advice of our host, we took a cab up the other side for more views.

The other thing we accomplished was laundry (one dollar a kilo for someone else to wash, dry and fold....what a deal) and haircuts ($5 per person! and that included a beard trim for Michael).

We enjoyed our brief stay in Baños. It was fine for us since we aren't the adventure sport type and we weren't planning on heading into the Amazon Jungle. We found some great restaurants and noted some of the quirky practices of the city. For example, check out the last video. We thought it was a late night ice-cream truck, but it turns out to be the garbage collectors.

Now we know how the restaurant got its name