Its Carnival time here in Banos, and its made the town a little crazy. There are presently about three times as many people here as usual. All of the hostels are booked up and there are people resorting to sleeping on the streets just to be here. I still have not figured out the exact significance of Carnival, but I do know for the Ecuadorians it is a time to party.

There was a huge parade to kick off the festival on Saturday afternoon. The streets were lined with hundreds of people who came to check it out.

The parade consisted mostly of children and animals. Schools from all around took part in the parade and the children all showed off their costumes and dancing skills.

The animals were pretty interesting/scary. They included some angry bulls and some excited horses just about taking out the crowd.

The floats involved were throwing everything from sugar cane to boxed wine to beer. It was very different from any parade you'd see in the states!

After the parade a few of us headed back over to the carnival rides and decided to take a risk and ride the somewhat questionable ferris wheel. It turned out to be ok and allowed us some nice views of the town and its very own waterfall.

The past two days I have spent making a little money as a safety kayaker on the local river, the Rio Pastaza. Yesterday I worked two trips and was out for almost 13 hours, afterwhich I was extremely tired and went straight to bed. Today I had only one trip, which was much better. I decided to bring my camera along and ended up taking a bunch of photos and selling them to the clients in order to make little extra money on the side.