"Feels just like I'm walking on broken glass..."(includes video)

(Sung to the tune from Annie Lennox)

On Saturday we decided to walk on a live volcano.

The rules are a little different in Guatemala so when our guide said that we’d be “playing with molten lava” I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant. It ended up being a great day.

Only an hour or so from Antigua is the trailhead for the Pacaya Volcano. We drove past Guatemala City and up into the mountains, leaving the car in a parking lot full of horses that are available to take tourists to the lava. We decided to huff it up there on foot for a little exercise. We’re sea-level people so the elevation (above 6,000 ft) was something but the trail was in great shape and we all did fine, making the lava fields in about an hour.

Once up there, we scrambled about ¼ mile down a steep bank and over a swath of loose lava rock to where the action was. The lava was very active and we could see it move, oozing, rolling and breaking off sections as it escaped from the base of the mountain. There are no boundaries up there so we could stand close enough to the action to roast a marshmallow! The fog rolled in and out giving the whole setting an other-worldly look. We had lunch and headed down the mountain, diving into the car just ahead of a heavy rain.

---

Videos from ""Feels just like I'm walking on broken glass..."(includes video)":

---

---