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Published: August 10th 2013
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Antigua
Yellow bridge First full day in Antigua and after having a nice lay in, I went with part of the group for an orientation walk with our CEO so that we knew how to get around and explore this beautiful old colonial city. We visited the main church and walked under the famous pretty yellow bridge which has a clock. Our CEO then went to check out some prices for excursions for the group and we had about 40 minutes to go do some exploring, so Alicia and myself went and walked around and looked at some of the old buildings that took serious damage from the 1770's earthquake. Antigua used to be the old capital city of Guatemala but after this terrible earthquake they decided to make Guatemala City the capital as it was in a safer location. The buildings are still standing but you can see how they were damaged by the earthquake as like part of the building is no longer there.
Our tour leader got us some prices and I decided to do the volcano trip as I really wanted to do this. We had a mini bus arranged and were taken to Pacaya volcano. Just as we
Old building
Old building damaged by the earthquake reached the entrance to walk up towards the volcano and the heavens decided to open, luckily I had my waterproofs with me. We were greeted by our tour guide and we started to climb the volcano, although we were not allowed to go right up to it's peak as it's an active volcano and it's been very active over the last few years and a journalist got killed there in 2010. As we started to climb to get towards the volcano, I found it very hard and was out of breath but after about 15 minutes or so, I really got into it and didn't find it as hard to climb. It took us about 1 hour to climb and we went quite far but obviously not as far as the peak. We had this dog follow us all the way up to the volcano from the entrance, boy is that doggie fit and healthy. Once we got to the highest point where we weren't allowed to go any further, we had some group photos and then found this great little hole which we all took turns to get inside and have a picture and as you got into the
hole you could feel the heat of the volcano.
I really did enjoy this trip but would have loved to have done the other active nearby volcano as you got to see lava, whereas with Pacaya, you just saw smoke.
After walking/running back down the volcano, we headed back to Antigua as it was Lisa and Fariba's last day with the group as they only opted to do half of the trip and so we went out for some food. The only problem was that everyone had over done it with the volcano trip and so everyone was tired and not really in the mood for going out, so we hoped that we would see them again the next night as we had 1 more day in Antigua and they were stopping on for a couple of days.
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