Montañita is the perfect party beach town. The beach is nice, the water's clean, and there's bars and restaurants and shops and stalls everywhere! You can find somewhere to party every night (we even managed on Sunday!) and we had a great group of people at our hostel!

Our hostel was aptly named Iguanas for the many iguanas that chilled out on the trees around the deck. There were also some strange massive rat like creatures which sometimes climbed up the trees and creeped us the f*** out! We never discovered what they were! For some reason at least every other day there was a power and water cut, sometimes for a few hours at a time, which all added to the fun. Trying to play card games by candlelight is pretty difficult!

We also developed some kind of addiction to street burgers! As they were only $1.50 and didn't actually make you sick, they were the cheapest food you could get, and the boys seemed to make it there mission to sample at least one burger from every single stand there was. I've never eaten so many burgers before in my life! We hung out in Montanita for a week with our friends at the hostel and then headed back south to Baños.

Incredibly disappointingly for me, the volcano which had been erupting just a week before (some girls had told us that at night they could actually see lava at the top!) was now no longer erupting! I kept hoping for it to suddenly start again but it didn't! Also the weather in Baños was constantly rainy, This wasn't the best for a place famous for all its outdoor activities...I therefore have to admit that we didn't actually do any mountain biking or canyoning or even the bridge jump (although the fact that Judith had hurt her neck doing it and Jay had hurt his back kind of put me off!). We did get the bus up to the Pailon del Diablo waterfall, and do the walk up to the waterfall, which involved a bit of crawling and climbing through caves, and we had clearly not dressed appropriately for in flip flops and no waterproofs! Alex broke one of his flip flops climbing up to the waterfall and had to walk around with one on the rest of the day, and we all got soaked! But it was really cool that you could actually go up behind the waterfall and stand between is and the rock behind you!

Baños was named as such of course for the thermal springs, which we didn't actually go to, but it also meant the town was full of spas and all the hostels offered massages and steam baths! We did go for massages. I decided against the chocolate massage deciding that having melted chocolate rubbed into my skin may not be that pleasant (and against the vino massage for the same reason!) but did go for a full body massage, which was an interesting mix of being incredibly tickly, to sudden hard pummelling, to burning hot clothes being put on my back! Alex, Jeffrey and I also did the steam baths, which Neil had told us we had to do! This involved being shut into a wooden box which was filled with steam, with your head sticking out of a hole! You got in and out doing various things when you were out; pouring cold water out of a bowl over yourself, sitting in a freezing cold bath, and being hosed down by cold water. It was funny watching the others reactions, and it was actually very refreshing and made you feel really good afterwards!

Another first in Baños, we found a Swiss restaurant that did fondue, and both the Swissies being majorly excited by this we took a group of people along with us for cheese fondue! I have never had it before, and I love cheese, so this was great! Especially since you basically can't get normal cheese in South America, it all tastes the same and like crap, so I enjoyed this immensely.

Bye bye, rainy Baños and non-erupting volcano! Next stop the capital: Quito!