The Bandits of Baños

After hiking Cotopaxi, eating food that is still alive, and trying to navigate new cities with no sense of direction, you'd figure that nothing would surprise me- let alone- kind of scare me, but then something did.. A friend that I met here in Baños and I decided that renting dune buggies like this



and driving through this



would be a fabulous idea! And for only $14 bucks for 2 hours I couldn't resist. So here we go whirling up and down hills, slinging mud, doing doughnuts, honking at cars, and driving through waterfalls- we were like Bonnie & Clyde, Batman & Robin- I named us the Bandits of Baños and no one was going to stop us until we heard baaa dumm, baaaa dummm, irkkk irkkk irrk, poofff. our get-away vehicle ran out of gas in the middle of a dark, one-way traffic tunnel, with no end in site. Fuck. Before I had time to think I heard one huge tour bus barreling through honking at us to get out of the way.

Push Eric! I yell.
What?
We gotta push, dude- go!

so he gets out and starts to push while I steer us back into civilization trying my best to get the thing to go. All of a sudden it starts so I floor it!

Run Eric! Run!! I shout
I'm trying, slow down! Eric screams with agitation
Nunca! Run faster! Jump in!

If you could just pause. take a moment and visualize this scene.

A huge tour bus stuck behind a skinny running boy wearing a baseball helmet (that is what they gave us) trying to jump in a dune buggie driven by me, a person who hasn't driven any type a vehicle in about a year. It was an astounding site.

We made it pretty far, but when you are out of gas you are out of gas, and eventually you just stop. So when this happened I had to pull out the good 'ol thumb and just start walking. I told Eric to stay behind and guard our piece of shit while I hitched a ride into town. A truck picked me up and thirty minutes later I rescued Eric and we celebrated over Ecuador's only type of beer- Pilsener.

What a day what a day.