18+ · For adults only.
The first thing I noticed about Baños was the sound of men slapping candy against doorframes.
I’d come up from Guayaquil on the night bus after a breakup that wasn’t dramatic enough to talk about and wasn’t small enough to ignore. The plan was simple: rent a bike, ride down the Ruta de las Cascadas to the Pailón del Diablo, eat something fried and sleep for twelve hours. Feel like a person again.
It was raining when I arrived. Not the hard, honest rain of the coast that stops after twenty minutes. Baños rain: fine, patient, endless. It hung in the air like it had nowhere else to be.
So I walked. On the street near the basilica, a man in an apron was pulling a thick rope of melcocha over a wooden peg nailed to his shop door, stretching it, folding it, slapping it back on the peg with a sound like a wet clap. The sugar turned from brown to gold as he worked. A small crowd watched, all of us damp and hypnotised.
“He’s been doing it the same way for thirty years,” said a woman next to me, without looking away. “My dad brought me here when I was eight. Same man. Same peg.”
She was quiteña, she told me later. In her thirties, rain jacket zipped to the chin, a dark curl stuck to her cheek. She’d come down alone for the long weekend to “not answer emails”. She bought a bag of melcocha and offered me the first piece before she’d tried one herself.
It stuck to my teeth for about ten minutes. She laughed at me the whole time.
The pools
That night, the rain still hadn’t stopped, and we both had the same idea: the Piscinas de la Virgen, the old hot pools at the foot of the waterfall at the edge of town. We hadn’t planned to meet there. When I saw her lowering herself into the hottest pool, wincing and grinning at the same time, I wasn’t entirely sorry.
You can’t really be shy in water that hot. The cold rain on your face, the heat up to your neck, the white noise of the waterfall lit up behind you: it makes people honest. We talked about the things you only tell strangers. Her job, which she was good at and didn’t love. My ex, who I’d stopped missing and started missing being someone’s. Her father and the melcocha man.
At one point she sank down until only her eyes were above the water and looked at me for so long I forgot what I was saying.
“Are you still doing the bike ride tomorrow?” she asked.
“If it stops raining.”
“It’s not going to stop raining,” she said, with total confidence.
The bike ride that didn’t happen
She was right. In the morning the rain was heavier, the mountains had disappeared completely, and the man at the bike rental shook his head before I’d finished the question. “Today, no. Landslides, maybe. Tomorrow, sí.”
I texted her: No Pailón. The mountain is closed.
She replied with an address and a time. Her hostal, a narrow house up the hill with a balcony full of wet geraniums. “They make good coffee,” she wrote. “And I have a deck of cards.”
I’m not going to pretend I didn’t know what I was hoping for. But I also want to say this, because it matters: nothing about that day was rushed. We actually played cards. She cheated, badly, and then accused me of cheating. We drank three coffees each. We sat on the balcony with a blanket over our knees and watched the waterfall on the cliff above town appear and disappear behind the cloud.
The room had a tin roof. If you’ve never been in a room with a tin roof in a long rain, you can’t imagine how loud it is, or how private it makes you feel. Like the rest of the world has been switched off.
Sometime in the afternoon, she put down her cards, and I put down mine.
“Is this okay?” I asked.
She smiled at me like it was a silly question, and then answered it anyway, very clearly: “Yes. Come here.”
What happened after that is between us and the rain. I’ll say only that it was slow, that we laughed more than I expected, that she kept asking what I liked and kept telling me what she did, and that at some point neither of us could hear anything except the roof.
The twist
The next morning the sky was clear and blue, and Tungurahua stood over the town as if it had been there all along, which, of course, it had.
We finally did the bike ride. We stopped at every waterfall. At the Pailón del Diablo, soaked by the spray on the hanging bridge, she told me something.
“I had a bus ticket back to Quito yesterday morning,” she said. “Eight o’clock.”
“You cancelled because of the rain?”
“I cancelled,” she said, “because a guy from Guayaquil got melcocha stuck in his teeth and didn’t even try to look cool about it.”
She went back to Quito that evening. I went back to Guayaquil. We still text. Some weekends, one of us takes a bus.
Last month she sent me a photo of a man in an apron slapping candy against a doorframe. It just said: Same man. Same peg. Rain forecast all weekend.
I bought the ticket before I’d finished reading it.
If you liked this, you might also enjoy Behind the Mask in Guápulo, The Last Room in Mindo and Humidity: One Night at a Villa in Ayampe.
Names and identifying details changed. Reader stories may be edited and dramatized.
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Not applicable (reader fiction; dramatized).
Cover photo: PHOTO: “Baños de Agua Santa en la noche” BY MINISTERIO DE TURISMO ECUADOR / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY-SA 2.0), EDITED