Pacaya

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When we arrived back in Antigua from Copan, lex had remembered that Handel's Messiah was playing that night at a convent ruin turned hotel, so we rushed home to get ready and quickly headed there. It was so so so amazing!!!! Thurs. morning, we got up and headed in to the market to buy things to cook for dinner. It was amazing, in the end we ended up with enough food to last probably 3 days for about $2. All fresh and amazing! We did have to pick up some things from the grocery store though, so that was about another $15 more, but still, not bad at all! Thursday was a day of relaxing, just running "errands" if you can call them that. Making reservations for lex and jose, scoping out hotels for them for new years, christmas shopping for me, and then we cooked dinner at home with Gg and her friend. Friday morning was lazy. We did some laundry, and then i took a shower! That afternoon we took a shuttle to pacaya, an active volcano that you can climb. The shuttle wasn't bad. The driver drove much slower, which I actually appreciated! Upon arrival, we bought our walking sticks from some little boys,and began the ascent. Yikes! it was much harder and longer than expected. Because of several erruptions, we took a differnt path than lex did last time, which equaled about 1k extra of hiking straight up the surface of the moon. It was 1 step up, slide 2 steps back down- with sharp jagged volcanic rock to fall on. I have the bloody gashes on my leg to prove it. Once we reached the actual lava flow, we were only allowed to be there for about 10 min. We were seriously about 5 feet, if that, from the lava, and you could see it under our feet lurkinging beneath the dried lava. Only in guatemala! this can't be safe! The air smelled like burnining rubber, so i was nervous about my tennis shoes from Jr. High that I was wearing. I dont think the soles were very thick. Oh well, i'm alive. The trip down a mountain after dark was also very interesting. It was like hiking through the woods(without much of a trail) with no light. Some people had flashlights, but none were powerful. Basically everyone was falling and tripping the whole way down. It was completely worth it though! The pictures are amazing!

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Comments

[Al Argueta]

awesome!
Thanks for the great blog entry. I've linked to it from my 'Guat's Going On' blog on Moon.com, where I blog about my books: Moon Guatemala and Moon Living Abroad in Guatemala.