The good:

• Location - Baños is a beautiful city nestled in a valley with lush green mountains, a river, hot springs, and lots of waterfalls.
• Friends - The group was really fun and we all got along well despite the cramped conditions in the van (see below). I roomed with my new friends Stephanie from the US, and Christina from Germany.
• Activities – There are tons of fun activities to do in Baños. On Saturday we road bikes and explored a few of the waterfalls. Two of them we hiked right up next to. Sunday I indulged a little and got a great 1-hour massage, while others went ziplining and horse-back riding.

The bad:

• Weather – it was cloudy and rainy the entire weekend. There are huge mountains and an active volcano, but we couldn’t see anything through the fog.
• The Van – We took a private van that had “seats” for 15 people… and crammed 15 people into it. Three seats were facing backwards, the three in the back bounced up and down with every bump on the road, and 2 of the seats were folded-down and didn’t have head rests. To put it nicely, it was uncomfortable.
• Lack of Organization – Well, this really only applies to me and Stephanie (possibly now known as the picky Americans). On Sunday we wanted to go to the Spa, nothing more. But somehow we spent ~4 hours driving around the city in that terrible van, despite our repeated attempts (in Spanish) to ask to be dropped off at the Spa. Finally they took us to their highly recommended spa, which turned out to be expensive and mostly focused on cleansing treatments. So we made them bring us to a different one, which turned into another hour of driving around in the van. Lesson learned… get out of the van and take a taxi!

Anyway, here’s some photos of the trip. I’m heading back to Baños next week with some friends, and I’m hoping for sunlight and better photos.

The van

Me & Stephanie

Manto de la Novia (Bride's Veil)

Manto de la Novia

We got drenched

This one you could walk behind

Christina and Paion del Diablo

The town of Banos

Our hostel

This is how the mountains looked all weekend

 

In case you’re wondering, yes, Baños means “baths” or “bathrooms” in Spanish. No, it’s not named after a toilet, but instead because there are tons of hot springs in the area due to a very large and very active volcano. Apparently you can see the red lava at night, and it’s particularly active right now. Let’s hope my next visit has clear skies, and an active-but-not-too-active volcano!

Volterra

We took a day trip from Siena to visit a small hill town called Volterra. It took a few long bus rides to get there and back, but it was totally worth it. We saw the beautiful countryside of Tuscany and got away from the main tourist track. The town of Volterra was cute and had some interesting history as well. It was a major town in Etruscan times, which is a fairly advanced Pre-Roman civilization in Italy around 700 B.C. We saw Etruscan ruins (arches, tombs, etc) and a museum with some impressive artifacts (grave stones, bowls, jewelry, and art). There were even ancient Roman ruins – an amphitheater from 1st century B.C.
 

But our main activity in Volterra was biking. We rented mountain bikes for a few hours, and headed straight downhill to the valley, and then powered our way back up. It was fairly difficult, but we enjoyed the strenuous exercise (which we’ve definitely been lacking) and biking is a great way to see more of a place and get off the beaten track.
 

Orvieto

After Siena we spent 2 nights in Orvieto. This was another cute old town built on top of a hill (they did this for defensive purposes in medieval times). Orvieto had great views and a very impressive Duomo (similar to the on in Siena). But honestly the highlight of this visit was cooking in the kitchen of our apartment! We went out of our way and spent extra $$ to find a place with a kitchen since we were tired of eating out and craving some home-made spaghetti. One thing we’ve found in Italy is that they have really great and really cheap tomato sauce (pomodora). It’s basically just plain tomato sauce (like Prego without all the extra seasonings and vegetables), and then we add some fresh ingredients of our own. It seems funny to cook spaghetti in Italy when we could get great pasta at any restaurant in town, but it’s so delicious, much cheaper, and really fun to make ourselves. Also, I even tried making my own bruschetta. It was so good… I think the key is the very fresh and delicious Olive Oil in Italy. Yum!
 

So that was our very limited stay in Tuscany… just enough to whet our appetite and convince us to return someday!

So anyway, while we were in Vienna I read about this bike trail nearby along the Danube River, and we decided to give it a shot. We wanted a little change from the big city sightseeing; to head into the country and get some exercise other than walking. So we headed to Krems, Austria on a morning train, found a hotel, rented bikes and headed down the Danube. It was so beautiful and we really enjoyed the ride. The trail is paved, fairly well-marked, and follows the river through little towns and countless vineyards. We only rode an out-and-back of 12 miles one way, but the entire trail is much longer and you can do multiple-day trips. Since it’s October the grapes were ripe and so we saw people picking and loading them into trucks. It also smelled like grapes… but not really in a good way, it smelled like rotten fruit. Overall the whole trip was really fun and we were glad that we went a little out of the way and spent a day on it.

Ben biking through vineyards

Danube River, Austria

Lots of grapes

View from a random old church

Danube River

Split, Austria

It took a lot of tries to get this photo

Pretty scenery along the Danube

Biking along the river

This side of the river had tons of apples

Ben biking through the apple orchard

Pretty town of Durnstein

Self portrait #1

Self portrait #2

Our base town of Krems

 

We also went with Katy to meet her friends for a birthday celebration. We all went out to eat at a traditional Austrian restaurant, and everyone made sure Ben and I ordered typical foods. I had some kind of  seasonal mushroom dish that was delicious, and Ben had schweinsbraten.   Good times.
 

A friend of a friend works in Vienna at the United Nations, so we met up with her for lunch. We took a short tour of the UN office, which was actually really interesting! There are four major headquarters of the UN: Vienna, NY, Geneva, and Nairobi. The one in Vienna mostly deals with security and protection. A part of the tour that I found really interesting was regarding the language translations for UN meetings. There are 6 official languages of the UN: English, French, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish. Whatever language is currently being spoken has to first be translated to French or English. Then it’s translated to all of the other 4 official languages. If any country needs another translation, they have to provide their own translator. You can imagine how hard of a job it would be to be a translator – they have to work fast and also be really careful not to imply the wrong message. For example, idioms like “under the table” and “bend over backwards” cannot always be translated word-for-word to different languages.  So they can only work 3 hours per day and have to take breaks every 30 minutes. And they get paid really well – it sounds like a really prestigious job.
 

We visited two museums in Vienna and both were great. One was the Kunst History Museum – a really great art museum with Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome stuff, and an impressive art collection. The art included my favorite, Raphael, and also Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and this crazy artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo who painted these weird faces with objects in the 1500’s. They had four of his paintings at this museum, including this famous one called “Summer”:
 

The other museum was the Natural History Museum, which had a huge collection of pretty much every animal, insect, rocks, and prehistoric ancient tools you could imagine. It even had a huge room of meteorites, a live working bee hive, and best of all, the “Venus of Willendorf.” This is a doll statue found near Vienna that is 25,000 years old.  Since this discovery there’s been a couple more statues found that are slightly older, but this one is close to being the very oldest existing. It looks really funny.
 

Besides that, we spent time just hanging out in Vienna, walking around and admiring buildings (our favorite version of free sightseeing!).  We loved the architecture and general feel of Vienna. Here are some various photos of the city.
 

FYI, even when I’m not posting I usually keep the “Where are we now?” box on the right side of the page up to date, and every once in a while I update the map on the “Travel Plans” page at the top menu.  And if that’s not enough, join Facebook and add Ben and I to your friend list, we add things there occasionally too.

Cesky Krumlov (Czech Republic) – 3 nights in a hostel in this small medieval town.  We had a good time wandering the streets, and also hanging out with the hostel managers and guests.

Vienna (Austria) – 4 nights with our awesome couchsurfing host, Katy.  We  loved Vienna and had so much fun hanging out with Katy and her friends. Vienna is a really beautiful city, but it still has a live-able feel to it; like a perfect mixture of Paris and Prague.

Biking the Danube (Austria) – we just spent a day biking a nice paved trail along the Danube River in northern Austria (1 hour east of Vienna).  The weather was beautiful and so was the scenery – rolling hills covered with vineyards and little towns with old castles and churches.

Next stop is Budapest, Hungary.  We’ve heard such great things about Budapest, I can’t wait to get there.  Also Ben has discovered that he loves goulash, so it’ll be fun to go there and try the ‘real’ thing.

Annecy

On our way from Southern France to Chamonix in the French Alps, we stopped overnight in Annecy. We didn’t know it before, but this is a popular resort city on a nice lake in the mountains.

In Chamonix we took another cable car ride with great views of Mont Blanc and Aiguille du Midi.

On the way to Interlaken, Switzerland, I planned in a 4 hour layover in Montreux, Switzerland. I don’t know much about Montreux except that it’s on Lake Geneva, and there’s a cool castle there called Chateau de Chillon. So we stored our luggage in lockers and checked out the castle. The castle is pretty big with lots of different rooms to explore. I could totally see me and my brothers as kids running around playing tag or hide and seek in this castle (or better yet, ghosts in the graveyard at night!). The castle is situated on a rock jutting out into the lake, with mountains in the background. Different parts of the castle are different ages, with the oldest tower is from the 12th century.

We spent 3 nights in the “Jungfrau” region of Switzerland (in the center near Interlaken, in the Alps). Unfortunately it was cloudy or hazy most of the time, so even though we got some good views of the mountains, the photos never really worked out. But it was obvious that this area is very beautiful. If we hadn’t just spent 5 days in the mountains in Chamonix and the weather was better, I think we would have spent a lot more time here. Maybe it’s a place we can come back to some day.

One day we went up a cable car to the Schilthorn mountain, and the other day we went “mountain” biking. That’s in quotes because basically we rented mountain bikes but spent most of the time on paved roads.  Unfortunately we haven’t found any real mountain biking in Europe yet… if anyone knows of a place with real single track dirt trails, let us know!

On a side note, I wanted to point out how NICE everyone we’ve dealt with in Amsterdam has been.  Waiters, store and hotel clerks, tourist information workers, even the tram drivers are all so friendly and not at all annoyed when we ask lots of stupid questions.  We’ll see if all of Europe is like this (I doubt it), but so far we’ve been amazed with how genuinlly nice people are.  I would definitely recommend The Netherlands and Amsterdam as a nice place to visit.

Start of the adventure:                                         The view:

Tunnels:

Trestles: