Tungurahua Refugio

After arriving back in Banos from my trip to El Altar, I ran into some friends I met in Quito, Pria and Cecily, who invited me to join them on a hike to the Tungurahua Volcano Refuge. It was something that I had been wanting to do for a while, so even though I was dead tired I decided to go along. I was under the impression that it was a fairly easy hike, but I was pretty wrong.

The hike was straight uphill on a very muddy trail for about 3 hours. The weather was ok, but very cloudy leaving us with no real view of the volcano once we reached the refuge. The wonderful thing about the hike was the cloud forest that you were hiking through. It was a very lush forest with lots of beautiful flowers along the way.

After finally reaching the top, we decided to make the hike a full on event and instead of taking a cab from the start of the trail, which is how we arrived, we decided to walk all the way home to Banos. This turned out to be a pretty long walk, taking us over 8 hours in total. The weather cleared up on the way down, allowing for some nice views of the surrounding mountains and the city. It definitely felt like a great accomplishment when we finally arrived back into town, and we were all very proud to have done it.

I am going to join Pria and Cecily on another adventure today going canyoning. After canyoning, Pria, Cecily, Keta and a bunch of my Ecuadorian friends from Banos are hopping on a night bus and heading to coast. We are going to bring along a few kayaks and do some surf kayaking in Mantanita. Time to get out of the altitude and onto the beach!