Of course there's the odd mugger, poor driving technique, and dirty money changers; but one danger that has been very obvious to me, and is rarely discussed, is how amazingly geophysically active our route is. I mean you can take a 20 minute hike and be standing in front of lava, every building has earthquake areas, the guide book says of every town "not leveled by earthquake since ..", and then there's the smoldering volcanoes. We spent several days in Banos, Ecuador at the foot of this smoldering giant. A true testament to how sick I was is that some AP reporter in a far off town took the only photo I have of Tungurahua. On one of my recovery walks we watched it shoot off about half this high, asking a local if we should start running, they non-chalantly said, naw, nothing to worry about...
Yikes
Taken a couple days after we left:
And here's an interesting link. Needless to say the 'glacier covered stratovolcano' no longer had a glacier on it. We also had to wait a couple hours for them to clear a mud/lava flow off the road!
http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/volcano.cfm?vnum=1502-08=
Follow our route:
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