...and thats how I ended up in prison..

Exciting weekend! After spending an extremely frustrating amount of time Friday unsuccessfully trying to make reservations at the beach for next weekend, a holiday, Saturday and Sunday were full of adventure.
Saturday morning we left at 7 am from Quito, for Cotopaxi National Park as a field trip for our volcanology class. Cotopaxi is a really tall, famous volcanic mountain about 3 hours from Quito (google it!) We drove a little ways up the mountain, then got out of the buses and hiked the rest of the way up to the glacier. It was extremely exhausting but totally worth it! It’s a pretty unbelievable feeling to go from 75 degrees in Quito to surrounded by snow on the slope of a volcano in less than 3 hours. Unfortunately, our professor is slightly absent-minded and didn’t tell to come to the fieldtrip prepared for cold, so I climbed it in pants and a light fleece. It took about 3 hours to thaw out after that experience…
In the early evening we arrived in the city of Banos, a popular tourist destination for extranjeros and Ecuadorians alike because of all the outdoors activities nearby, and that’s where we spent the night. Most of the Ecuadorians on the trip had been to Banos and sort of knew the lay of the land, so they knew what to do to have a good time there. That night they organized a “chiva”—picture an open air-party bus, with a dance floor in the back half—to take us to a lookout spot above the city. So we rode to the top of this hill, and from there you could see all of Banos spread out below and the volcano Tungurahua (which explodes every 20-30 minutes) in the distance.
We woke up at 5 am Sunday to head to Pailon del Diablo, a huge waterfall outside of Banos. We hiked about 30 minutes down a canyon to the waterfall as the sun was coming up. Seeing the falls from the bottom was pretty incredible, but the main attraction is the tunnel that they built that winds its way up behind the falls to a lookout spot at the top, directly behind the flow of water. Unfortunately, it was so early that the entrance to that path was still locked…and this is how I should have ended up in jail:
Our teacher, Theo, was pretty disappointed for us that we weren’t going to get to go to the top of the waterfall, so he said off handedly to me, “you should just see if you can climb up that wall and over the gate at the entrance”. Well, if he was being sarcastic I couldn’t tell (a combination of his greek accent and broken Spanish)… I went for it. I made it over the top of the gate and to the other side, where I looked around, unsuccessfully, for the key to let the others in. I couldn’t find it, but I figured since I was already over, I HAD to go see the top, right? So I walked up the path, wedged my way through the tunnel, and came out behind the cascade with the wall of water falling all around me. It was incredible (and probably slightly more so knowing it was slightly illegal…)! As I made my way back to the group, a few others had climbed over, so I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who got to see it.
After hiking back to the bus, we returned to Banos for a much needed breakfast, and then set off for the volcano Tungurahua, the most active volcano in Ecuador because it produces a small explosion of ash, rock, and vapor every 20 or 30 minutes. Even though it happens so consistently, it was still a pretty unfamiliar feeling to sit on the slope of a volcano while it erupts over your shoulder! Around mid afternoon we hit the road back to Quito—Theo had promised to have us back in time for the Super Bowl… I think the weekend got the best of me and I got pretty sick Sunday night but I’m feeling better now, and pretty invincible after facing a glacier, freezing rain, a near escape from the Ecuadorian legal system, a hike down a canyon in the pitch darkness, the most active volcano in Ecuador, and the “24 hr bug” in less than 2 days!