More South America Photos/Video!

[T. Brown 1st MRB]

I'm too lazy to find the old thread, so I'm just making a new one. Girl and I spent the weekend in Banos, biking through the valleys and climbing mountains and petting dogs and probably getting worms from them BUT SO WORTH IT. There are SO many dogs in South America, it's ridiculous. Most of them are friendly and just want food/pets...we did run into one on the mountain side that kind of stalked us, growling the whole time, but we found that there was this woman picking limes about 500 meters up from where we were, and it was her guard dog.

Lime picker and her mean ass guard dog

Yes, I looked for cats. There is a bar there that was notorious for having cats that would jump on you, but when we got there, they only had one cat. All the other cats over the years had gone, or been adopted. I did pet that one cat, it was nice.

My favorite picture of the whole trip was taken after hiking for an hour up a mountain near the city...there were 7 stray dogs running amok and playing. I got this picture right at dusk; they were the happiest dogs I've ever seen.

Most of the trip, I liked taking pictures of her looking at the sights, so these are them:

75% of the way up the mountain, above Banos

Looking at Palion de Diablo waterfall near Rio Verde

Halfway through our 30km bike ride. That was a fucking amazing experience, in part because the roads had no bike lanes so we had these huge tour buses speeding past us at ridiculous speeds (speed is a huge issue in South America; lots of bus crashes have killed tourists here because of unsafe speeds), but also because views like this were constant.

The single greatest thing about this whole trip is that 3 days there cost us maybe $100 total. The hostels can go for as little as $7 a night, there are daily buses from Quito (where I live) to here that cost $2 (yes, it's a little scary, but that's culture right?). Renting bikes all day cost $5. Food is ridiculously cheap; I had this delicious curry crepe from a fancy restaurant for 3 bucks...everything is cheap! This is a completely manageable experience for anyone who has the time off to do it.

Oh, and I jumped off a 120meter high bridge with a rope. It took 6 minutes from wandering onto the bridge to jumping off, so my girlfriend claimed she didn't have enough time to get into a good spot to take video/pictures, so all I have is the countdown and the jump, with a picture of me hanging 80+ meters above a raging river. THAT was a fucking experience, I tells you what. They kept saying "very safe, it's ok", but we're in fucking South America...NOTHING IS SAFE HERE! I also thought it would be better if I jumped headfirst, due to the parabola of the swing...I am still sore from the shock when your freefall gets stopped by a fucking piece of rope jerking you back.

During the swing. IT WAS BLOODY FANTASTIC...once I realized I didn't die.

[Melnyk 1st MRB]

This is all really cool! Glad you had a good time and was able to share some photos with all of us.

[J. Hill]

nice views. love the falls. you could not pay me enough to bungee jump like that.

[Candy 1st MRB]

Awesome! Awesome....great pictures you DareDevil!

[A. Cannon 1st MRB]

The photo with the dogs could almost be a post card.

[Beuting 1st MRB]

nice views. love the falls. you could not pay me enough to bungee jump like that.

I would also pay to do that. (It always goes down anyways)

....and i wanna adopt (and deworm) the dogs <3