When two nights turns out not to be enough
It happens more often than you would think. Someone arrives for a stopover, spends a day in the Old Town, and starts asking at reception what else there is. The honest answer is: a great deal, and Ecuador is unusually small. Three destinations are worth changing your flights for.
The short version
- Baños — 3.5 hours south. Waterfalls, hot springs, adrenaline, an active volcano. Two nights minimum.
- Cuenca — a UNESCO colonial city in the south. An hour by air, most of a day by road. Three nights.
- Tena — the accessible Amazon, five hours east. Two or three nights.
- Ecuador is roughly the size of the UK or Colorado. Everything is closer than you assume.
- All three are lower than Quito, which makes them easy on a body still adjusting.
Baños de Agua Santa
Three and a half hours south of Quito, at 1,820 metres, on the exact seam where the Andes fall away into the Amazon basin. It is a small town — two kilometres end to end, entirely walkable — and it has become Ecuador's adventure capital for a simple reason: the geography is extreme in every direction.
Above it stands Tungurahua, 5,023 metres, called the Throat of Fire in Kichwa. It erupted more or less continuously from 1999 to 2016, evacuating the town repeatedly. It is quiet now, monitored around the clock, and the town has built an identity out of living beneath it.
What you do there:
- The hot springs that give the town its name — volcanically heated water at 42 to 55°C, coming out of the ground at the base of the volcano.
- The Ruta de las Cascadas — a ten-kilometre run past seven major waterfalls, best done by bicycle downhill, ending at the Pailón del Diablo, eighty metres of water dropping into a canyon you can walk behind.
- La Casa del Árbol and its swing over the valley. It began as a platform built to observe the volcano and became the most photographed swing in South America.
- Adrenaline — canyoning, rafting class III and IV on the Pastaza, ziplines strung five hundred metres between mountains, bridge jumping.
Two nights minimum, three if you want the adventure sports rather than the photographs. Buses leave Quito's Quitumbe terminal roughly every half hour.
Practical note: fog usually sits on the town first thing and clears by midday, and the volcano viewpoints are best before nine in the morning. The same cloud clock as everywhere else in this country.
Cuenca
Ecuador's third city and, for many visitors, its most beautiful. A UNESCO World Heritage site at 2,550 metres in the southern highlands, built along four rivers, with cobbled streets, blue-domed cathedrals and a pace noticeably slower than Quito's.
It is also where Panama hats actually come from — a name that has irritated Ecuadorians for over a century, since the hats were made here and merely shipped through Panama. There are workshops and a museum where you can watch them woven.
Two things nearby are worth the trip on their own: Cajas National Park, a high páramo of hundreds of glacial lakes forty minutes away, and Ingapirca, the most significant Inca site in Ecuador.
Three nights. An hour by air from Quito, or most of a day by road — and the road version, down the avenue of volcanoes, is one of the great bus journeys in South America if you have the time to enjoy it rather than endure it.
Tena and the accessible Amazon
Five hours east, dropping to around 500 metres. Tena is the capital of the Napo province and the easiest jungle in Ecuador to reach — no flight, no night bus, no four-hour canoe.
It is not the Cuyabeno. The forest is less pristine, the wildlife less concentrated, and you will see more agriculture. What you get instead is whitewater rafting on some of the best rivers in the region, Kichwa communities running their own tourism, caves, waterfalls and a genuinely warm, green, unhurried place.
Two or three nights. If your idea of the Amazon is dawn canoes and a lodge with no road access, go to the Cuyabeno instead. If you have four days and want jungle without a night bus, Tena is the answer.
Which one, for the days you have
| If you have | Go to |
|---|---|
| Two spare nights and want adrenaline and hot water | Baños 1,820 m |
| Three spare nights and care about colonial cities | Cuenca 2,550 m |
| Three spare nights and want jungle without a night bus | Tena ~500 m |
| Four or five and want the real rainforest | Cuyabeno 220 m |
| One spare night only | Stay in Quito |
That last row is meant seriously. A single extra night is not enough for any of these — you would spend it travelling. It is, however, exactly enough for a proper day at Mindo or Otavalo, and for a second unhurried day in the Old Town.
How to get around the country
- Long-distance buses are excellent and cheap. Comfortable, frequent, and a fraction of what you would expect. Most southbound and eastbound routes leave from Quitumbe, in the far south of Quito — allow an hour to get there from the Old Town.
- Domestic flights connect Quito with Cuenca, Guayaquil, Coca and Loja. Cheap by international standards and they turn a nine-hour bus into an hour.
- Private drivers make sense for two or more people going to Baños, and let you stop at Cotopaxi on the way.
- Distances lie on a map. Mountain roads mean a hundred and eighty kilometres takes three and a half hours. Always check the hours rather than the kilometres.
A note on volcanoes
Several of Ecuador's volcanoes are active at any given moment, and it changes. Sangay and Reventador have been erupting more or less continuously in recent years; Cotopaxi has been under elevated monitoring with the park open; Tungurahua is currently quiet.
Ecuador's Geophysical Institute publishes daily reports and runs a four-level alert system. If you are building a trip around a specific mountain, check igepn.edu.ec rather than a travel blog, including this one. Access closes at short notice when it needs to, and no responsible operator will argue with that.
Where this leaves the Galápagos
An honest word if you are already going to the islands. A Galápagos trip plus one of these is a substantial holiday and will not feel rushed. A Galápagos trip plus two of them, inside two weeks, means you will spend a lot of it in transit.
If we had to choose one to pair with the islands, it would be Baños — it is the shortest journey, the biggest change of landscape, and it descends, which after a week of Andean altitude is welcome. If you have longer, Cuenca rewards a slower trip more than anywhere else in the country.
What we do here
We will help you work out whether the days you are thinking of adding are actually enough, book the bus or the flight, and hold whatever luggage you do not want to take with you. If your plans change while you are here — which they often do, usually in the direction of staying longer — talk to reception before you book anything online. We can usually do better, and we would rather you spent the extra night here than in a terminal.
Most people wish they had given Ecuador another week
Nine rooms in a restored 1914 house in San Blas, and a front desk that will tell you honestly what fits. Book direct for our lowest rate — and come back through Quito on the way out.
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Useful on the night you start wondering whether to change the flights.
