Blogs from Pacaya, Capital Region, Guatemala, Central America Caribbean - page 3

Sunday 4th November. Hola! Whats the craic. All is fantastic here, hope its the same where ever you all are!!! So this is just a quick blog about the visit to volvan Pacaya. Its an active volcano about an hour and a half from Antigua. I left with my trusty sidekick, Camilla, at 1pm with about 40 other tourists. When we arrived we were greated by about 40 people who live around the volcano selling sticks and especially taxi rides on rather small horses up the track to the volcano. So off we took. It was one hour and a half through the forest to the foot of the volcano, most of which Camilla spent running scared of the horses! We stopped half way at a view point where we saw smoke billowing out of a ... read more

Hill climbing? Check. Mountain climbing? check. Temple climbing? Check. Pyramid climbing? Check. Volcano climbing?..................... Aha, one thing missing off my activity list before I have some self-deserved lazy days! The town where I am now (Antigua) has 3 volcanoes which you can see from the town centre, but none have been active recently. Volcan Pacaya is over an hours drive from Antigua, but it is the only one where you can see real, proper, scary, massively hot lava! It takes an hour and a half (boo!) to hike up to where the volcanic rock is. There are little kids that hire out walking sticks and you really need them- I think my stick saved my life several times. The volcanic rock was so weird. It was so sharp that if you slipped or fell it would ... read more

The highlight of my stay in Antigua was by far the day trip I took out to Volcan Pacaya (2550 meters)- the active volcano located approximately an hour drive outside of Antigua. After hiking up the dense forests at the base of the volcano on a cold, overcast day for about two hours our adventure turned a bit crazy. We finally arrived to the dried up lava portion from the eruption in 2006 and had to traverse some really jagged rocky terrain through some extremely dense fog (at one point I could only see a couple of feet in front of me). As we made our decent we could clearly see rivers of lava in the distance as the fog started to clear a bit. We followed our guide as the air started getting hotter and ... read more

Hello there everyone, Well i´ve been here 2 weeks now and it´s flown by. I´ve finished my 2 weeks (40 hours) in spanish school and it was hard. There´s so much to learn, but what better place to do it than here. The weather has been on the whole good apart from the daily shower when we have some pretty heavy rain (as it´s rainy season) and the little tremor on Wed from an earthquake. Now I know what to do if there is a proper earthquake. It´s pretty crazy really but also not that unusual, my host family are used to it. Yesterday I climbed up a volcano called Volcan Pacaya. It´s about 1.5 hour drive away and we set off at 8am. After arriving at the start point it was then a 2 ... read more

This afternoon we caught a bus to Pacaya - a live volcano near Guatemala city. We climbed right to the top and walked around the cooling lava flows. You can look down into the hot magma below wherever there are cracks in the solidified lava. We went late in the afternoon and it was almost completely dark by the time we got to the top. The boys all poked sticks into the magma and set fire to them. It was way cool.... read more