Travels with archy and beyond

We arrived in Punta Delgada, the largest town (population 67,000) in the Azores at 10 pm Tuesday evening and stayed the one night at a hotel so delightful, we canceled our AirBnB booking for later in the week in order to stay here again. Our first two full days, however, have been in Furnas, a town of 1,500 about 40 km to the east which sits on active fumaroles, places in the earth where the steam from a not-so-defunct volcano pushes out of the earth. There are so many of these that the town has a special dish, called Cozido, that is actually cooked in these fumaroles! Here is how it goes…..

It looks perfectly normal, an amazing combination of cold and tropical. When you continue around a bit further, however….