Back for Christmas, rich Guatemalan style!

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Tim Version:
* Returned to Antigua for Christmas at Jungle Party Hostel and enjoyed the colourful Antigua christmas time.
* Reeeally enjoyed a good Christmas dinner at the hostel and Christmas lunch at a nice little restaurant - but no presents. Kind of refreshing!
* Climbed Pacaya, a very active volcano, got to walk over lava, and toast marshmallows in it! Oh, and had the best fun haggling with kids for sticks...

The version that really loved a gringo filled Christmas, and seeing REAL ACTIVE LAVA!!:

Arriving back in Antigua man the streets were busy, but in a very good way. I walked my way to Jungle Party Hostel and checked in - this place is so freakin comfortable its dangerous! A beer tap behind you, you sitting in a beanbag, TV with an incredible DVD collection and cable in front, friends around you, and fires at night... goodbye money and time! Thanks to Antigua and Xela being hotspots, the bus ride back here was also very cruisy, except for one small exception... and elderly Mayan woman projectile vomiting for 3 hours with sounds that pierced through my turned up as high as possible music! I swear she was possessed as her little body couldn't have possibly held that much shit!

Feliz Navidad (Merry Christmas in Spanish) signs were everywhere, with cheesy music coming from loudspeakers and people yelling about christmas specials all over the place - ahhh just like home =) Plastic and tinsel seemed to have taken over the mortar and tile in the city, growing at a scary pace like colourful slightly gay vines covering the city.

On Christmas Eve, the hostel was very mutlicultural, filled with Aussies, Brits, Israelies, Germans, Dutch, French, Canadians, Americans and Swiss. The daytime I spent just chilling in the hostel talking to people, and I found a fwe girls who had booked into a Christmas lunch the next day at a place called Reds so I booked into the same place to join them. For dinner no-one had anything planned, and the hostel had a bit of a lost feeling to it, until the owner decided to throw a free Christmas dinner for everyone which was incredibly delicious and was just the right ingredient to kick off the socialising in the place! I think the amount of booze that started flowing because of it well and truly made up the cost of the dinner, and the gesture from the hostel was seriously appreciated. It generated a real Christmas spirit!

After dinner most of us headed to the pubs. Many were closed as the Guatemalans were all off having a family Christmas dinner, but after trying the Black Cat and finding it full, we went to Reillys, the Irish pub in town, and that was cranking! A funny place, I can't see why it is popular at all except the constant crowd... but the crowd seems so constant and dedicated to drinking there that it never goes away! Irish pubs, what would the drinking world do without them? with our crew of 12 or so we had a good night and talked about the most random stuff, and I discovered Cabro, a beer kind of like Gallo but better! That put as much of a smile on my face as the Christmas dinner, the amount I love a good beer is, well, scary... but I really really do! We didn't leave the place until about 3 or 4am, stumbled our way back to the hostel and annoyed the night watchman by waking him up. He is, however, already one of the most grumpy night watchman I have ever met in a hostel, so I didn't lose any sleep over it...

Christmas day was, as it kinda should be, hung over. I woke up, wandered outside, and got some tipico breakfast with 2 Aussie girls who were hung over as hell too. Virtually nothing was open in town and it was really quiet. The service and food were lousy but they felt so good to a hung over stomach and head. It took 2 asks to get our coffees, and 4 to get our pupusas and bread, but it all worked. A few more hung over hours later we all sat down for Christmas lunch and I loved every damn bit of it! They, the restaurant, had done their best to make it authentically western but the meat was luke warm, some vegies a little hard, and the desert uncooked... and yet it tasted brilliant! Such a totally opposite type of food than I have been eating for months, a typical English meal to me now is like an exotic curry!

Post food, I was tired, happy, fat feeling and still hung over so I retired to the hostel for movies and very little moving. Thankfully the hostel has an open roof as we got to see some fireworks without even remobving our lazy asses from the beanbags! I did however very late take a wander and found a Jesus procession wandering the streets, and a couple of guys on a roof throwing presents to a crowd, and it was brilliantly central american! No throwing of lollies or toys, but instead throwing of the round plastic tubs and bags of plastic bags that they all love so much! It was so typical that it was hard to believe and had me openly laughing out loud - not laughing at them, but laughing that I would have said this is what they would throw as a joke but here they were really doing it!

My last day of the Christmas period, boxing day, was spent climbing Pacaya... un-freaking believable. It is one very mesmerising active volcano! Pacaya was a tour that everyone was doing so I thought maybe it would be a bit cheesy, but I was dead wrong. Its incredible! Not an experience you are likely to ever forget. We had almost the entire hostel on the same tour making for an incredible group dynamic. We all got picked up at about 2pm and the drive was a fair distance filled with joking around and conversation. After curling uphill towards the volcano, watching it billow smoke with a greyish ominous presence of clouds around it, we arrived at base camp - heaven if you want to hire a horse or buy a stick! Buy a stick? Yes, buy a stick. To use for walking, and poking the volcanic ground in front of you while walking over lava to make sure it isn't hollow and won't collapse! Trust me, buy a stick... besides, barting with the hoardes of kids wanting to sell them to you is the most fun bartering you will ever have!

The climb begins green and lush, then goes to dryer scrub with awesome valley views, followed by reaching the barren sandy rocky top. Despite having seen quite a few volcanos now, this one is possibly the most spectacular and also the easiest climb as its really just a walk. Its top is a moonscape of black volcanic sand and small rocks, with larger rockier areas that are the hardened skeletons of previous lava flows. This is where I discovered I seem to have some mountain goat genetics! While most others were scrambling, pushing rocks down behind them, I seemed to be able to jump around without any impact, very handy here! The British and Aussie girls were going really well too but the US guy and some others were really struggling with the soft ground falling away beneath their feet. The Israelis, fresh from military training, were some of the worst where I kind of expected them to be kicking ass! Past the steeper more vertical scramble is where the magic happens... lava, raw open lava flowing! The sight is mindblowing, something I have dreamt about since I was a kid and always hoped to see. Every little bit more you climb higher you think wow this couldn't get any better, but it does! One spot has the lava coming straight out of the ground in a large slow stream, pulsing yellow and red with a heat that prevents you getting too close. The rock around it is shiny, made of strands glued together, as if created by silkworms and it looks like it could be woven. Truly Magic! You can walk all over areas where you can see the lava flowing maybe 30cm or less beneath your feet. Marshmallow time! The whole time walking up the last bit I had been collecting these little sticks, thinking we're gonna need these, and I'm glad I did as everybody needed one but only one other girl picked one up! Toasting the marshmallows was awesome, and they tasted so damn good. Our guide took it one step further by putting lava on the end of his stick and lighting a cigarette with it!

We were at the top before almost all other groups and got to see an incredible sunset over the neighbouring mountains, then while climbing down saw the scary amount of people that were all just arriving at the peak to see the lava and were just not going to fit! Glad to be leaving the crowds we climbed back down and by torch light walked most of the path. We had natural light for the rocky parts and for all the others just climbing up I could see it being very tricky just with a torch light! Just before we left the open desolate area we saw an incredible sight as the laval switched paths, coming much closer to those walking up the hill. At the same time, a few boulders fell out of the original lava flow, very impressive!! A little scary, but impressive! There was no real warning either, showing how dangerous is could be...

A little awed, we drove back all hungry talking about food that we knew we couldn't get in Antigua (at least not at a backpacker price!), and once in Antigua settled for some wicked vendor food from near the bus depot with some piping hot Arroz con Leche (rice with milk), and slept very happily and satisfied that night...

Volcanoes were a huge part of this trip for me, and now I've seen big and small, lush to bare, active and inactive, spewing volcanic rock to slowly bleeding lava, from far away and close up, mountain range lines of them to single solitary giants and even them as standalone islands (Ometepe), and have climbed, scrambled, hiked, and sandboarded their slopes. I've even got to dance around in their sulphurous gas leaking craters and stood above lava close enough to melt shoes. Can I count Lago de Atitlan swimming in a very old dormant one's lake? I reckon thats quite a list, and its all waiting for anyone who wants it all within Central America, and it is so so worthwhile doing... Next I needa find me one in the snowy mountains I think?

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Photos

The peak of Pacaya
Leaving the green heading for the moonscape

The peak
Didn't get to climb right to this point... way too unstable and dangrous.

Marshmallow time!
Tastes so much better when its lava that you've cooked it on...