Baños is a very touristy little town with lots of outdoors activities going on. The climate is very nice, around 25 degrees, not humid, just nice and friendly. We had a little break there, taking care of our blog, did some laundry, reading and took half a day of Spanish lessons.

The town is situated directly underneath the Tungurahua volcano, which is not only active, but erupting momentarily. Just a few weeks ago a couple of explosions combined with lava flow and hot ashes floating down to the valley scared the inhabitants of Baños.

The danger is very present. Everywhere within the city there are emergency signs, showing the directions to the evacuation routes. In case of a larger eruption the population is meant to leave the valley on the opposite side of the volcano.

View of Baños

As we were sitting in our room one evening, suddenly a loud noise made us jump to our feed. The whole ground shook. We nervously looked at each other having both the possibility of a large eruption in mind.

After a few seconds the whole thing was over. We opened the window to hear whether there would be any sirens. We stood there at the window a few minutes, but beside the usual barking of the neighborhood dogs there was nothing to hear. So we decided that this was not that bad after all. We looked up the volcano in Google whether we could see some information, and indeed there was some sort of explosion at the Tungurahua that was shown on some seismographic measurement stations around. But in comparison to what the graph looks like on a “real” eruption it was clear this was only a small burp of this giant.

The little “burp” visible on the live measurement data

thats how it looks when it you should get ready to run (recorded August this year)

The Tungurahua volcano

The volcano is momentarily erupting

There are several viewpoints on the volcano, but since it was cloudy most of the days we didn’t go there. On the day of our departure from Baños we drove up the mountain opposite of the volcano to have a view. It was still in clouds, but as we were sitting up there the sky cleared up and we had a wonderful view on the Tungurahua.