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Published: January 29th 2013
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For our first day in Antigua we took ourselves on a Lonley Planet walking tour, Antigua is a beautiful city, apty called Guatemala´s ´show piece.´ There is street after street of colourful character buildings, churches, convents etc. The people are incredibly friendly and helpful. In Guatemala, if you enter a restaurant or board a public bus, it is polite to greet everyone with a ´buenos dias or tardes´depending on the time of day, and people do! They must find foreigners quite unfriendly.
One of the activites we wanted to do in Antigua was climb a volcano. We opted for a tour as the warn against tourists trekking up volcanos alone (mainly due to opportunists). Turned out our tour was just us and after being driven to the volcano, we were met by our guide ´Carlos.´He was fantastic, he lived in a village on the volcano so great knowledge of the history and area, he also had very good english, learned from American TV.
The volcano´Pacaya´is 2550 metres high and we trekked to 2450 metres as it´s not safe to get too close to the crater. The volcano last errupted in 2010 killing a Guatemalan reporter and villages as rocks
crashed down on their huts. As a result of the erruption the landscape was very sparse. The views from the top were stunning, 3 of the 4 volcanos in the area were visible as well as views out to the Pacific Ocean.
In total Guatemala has 37 and a half (Aparently 1 is on the border with Mexico but they are quite specific that half is theirs) volcanoes of which three are active. Of the three that are active two are on the edge of Antigua one being the one we were on and it was smoking away hapily. The second visible from Pacaya where we were erupted in September last year.
Prior to our descent, we were treated to marshmellows roasted over a volcanic vent, very cool!
The following day found us as ´Filadelphia Farms´about 10 mins drive out of Antigua, the planned activities, a tour of the 200 acre coffee plantation (see separate blog) and zip lining.
I was enjoying the coffee plantation tour so much, I hadn´t really though (or worried) too much about the zip lining tour. It was high up in the moutain (we were driven up in an ex Danish
military vehicle) and a series of 7 lines of varying height, length and speed. The first 4 were great, the 5th was a bit faster and scarier, the 6th however looked terrifying and I was still shaking from the 5th one. It took me a good 5 minutes, almost tears and the realisation this was the only way down, for my feet to depart that platform.... and it was pretty scary, we reached 30km / hr and it was high up above the forest. It turned out to be nothing compared to the further 2 that Russell did, one was 500 metres long and speed of 70km / hr. He´s a lot braver than me when it comes to speed / plummeting etc. I would like to point out though that the extra 2 lines were not part of the standard course, but an added extra (I didn´t chicken out!)
For our final day in Antigua, we visited ´Casa Jackson´a clinic for malnourished children in and around Antigua. We had called in the day prior and found out what the clinic needed, so we were able to buy 200 nappies, 3 big containers of baby wipes, 10 cakes of
soap, 5 kilograms of sugar and 10 kilos of rice, plus the clothes and toys our friends had kindly donated back in NZ. It was a much appreciated package which we hope will make a difference. We will write a separate blog with specifics on the clinic.
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