Ecuador

Ecuador, home of the highest density of active volcanoes anywhere on the planet. That’s not a bad claim to fame. Except for the fact, of course, that mosyt of these active volcanoes threaten to wipe out huge volumes of people when the erupt, and its not an IF you’ll notice, its guaranteed that they will erupt. Around once every 100 years, and most of them are at about 110 now!

Anyway, back to my entry here…..

When we asked a few people, even those in Quito, what to do for a few days when we arrived, all of them said “leave Quito”, so we figured that was the thing to do.

Thanks to our awesome travel agent here in Quito we have managed to get ourselves out of Quito and out to an Amazon Jungle trip for 4 days. All of these trips include days of travel as part of the experience so we are in fact at the lodge for 2.5 days and the rest is travel.

So we were met early in the morning by our guide, Fabian, who speaks excellent English and is quite a funny bloke. The trip took us through a few of the towns south of Quito and oddly they all seem to specialize in something different. There is the town that makes a type of ice cream that is famous all around Ecuador, and another we stopped in that is the blue jeans capital of Ecuador. All of the towns seem to have some sort of claim to fame. Pic below is at the highest waterfall in South America.

We also went through three towns that had been completely destroyed by Volcano eruptions in the last 120 years. Pretty amazing to see the river valley and see 20ft of ash in the soil profile. It is also a bit scarey as we were heading to the Volcano that is currently erupting, Tungurahara. Now T (as I am going to call it to save on typing) is a BIG BIG volcano. 5800m in fact. It started erupting 8 years ago and has been going ever since. But in the last three months it has been going crazy, lava flows, pyroclastic ejections, ash fall, you name it, its doing it.

At the foot of this volcano, no…. more like at the belly button of this volcano is the spa town of Banos. It is in deep deep trouble. If the volcano even slightly moves its crater face to the west, Banos will be annihilated. Experts have predicted that if this were to occur lava flows would reach Banos in 3 minutes. And there is no way out. I am calling it “certain death valley”. And that’s we were headed. Giddyup!

The first thing you notice along the road into Banos is that there is no road anymore, this is because a lava flow destroyed it two years ago, and 4 years ago and 6 years ago and 10 years ago. You get the idea. 4000 m above the town is the smoldering crater and vents of T. Well so we are assured as we couldn’t see jack because of the rain and low cloud.

So we had a lovely lunch in Banos another bit of an ABC episode and a nice wander around the streets, but there is this underlying feeling that noone is at peace here. Everyone is edgy, rob and I were not so much edgy as mortified…… don’t these people know there is a Fuc*&ing great volcano about to destroy them? They have already forcibly evacuated 15000 people from the town edges, but the locals are staying put. We were not.

It was with a great sense of relief that we left the town in one piece, without being engulfed by a red hot lava flow of being obliterated by a pyroclastic boulder. We loved the town, very beautiful and with absolutely no long term future. At least they didn’t have to kid themselves.

On to the Amazon lodge then!