The tourists were visiting the volcanic Afar region, which is one of the hottest places in the world and a known haunt of rebels and bandits from Eritrea and Ethiopia.
Santorini's volcanic crater, the caldera, is one of the Greek islands' iconic views, and it is a 10-minute walk from this quiet hotel.
There are more restaurants in Garachico, and excursions include the nearby cliffside village of Masca, and volcanic Mount Teide with its weird, lunar landscapes.
I visit the El Tatio geysers, a sunrise spectacle of erupting water, steam and hot volcanic mud, and take a dip in the thermal pools.
For the farmers on western Nicaragua's volcanic range, who tend to favour beans over almost all other crops making a living from just beans is far from stable, despite the fertile soils.
Elsewhere in the Canaries, Tenerife hopes to attract visitors to its natural volcanic beauty with a new walking festival from 10-14 March.
At an altitude of 3,500 metres, it looks down on the Atacama desert, the driest place on earth, and on each side snow-capped volcanic peaks stretch away for hundreds of kilometres to the north and south.
Our neighbours (parents of my best friend, Lindy) were probably my role models; they seemed to speak in hushed tones, lived by what appeared to be clockwork routine and never displayed emotion of any sort in public, unlike our volcanic household.
A series of studies have since identified a number of factors, including heat transferred into deep oceans and small volcanic eruptions, that affected the temperature at the surface of the Earth.
Earth's history is marked by a number of major mass extinctions of species, triggered by volcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts and release of methane from sediments.
It was rebuilt after a volcanic eruption in 1993 – the inhabitants deciding that their original village, tucked in the shadows of Quezala canyon, was a prime target for deadly pyroclastic flows.
