Advertisement
Published: October 20th 2015
Edit Blog Post
The main reason I wanted to visit Leon was to volcano board Cerro Negro, and it didn't disappoint!
We set off at 9am to the volcano, and on arriving at the park and paying the entrance fee we were shown given the chance to hold a blue boa constrictor that is one of the snakes used in their repopulation programme, and shown baby green iguanas.
Green iguanas are the only completely vegetarian iguanas and are apparently very tasty so their numbers are very low. Luckily now eating them has been outlawed so hopefully their numbers will keep climbing 😊
Moving from the entrance to the base of Cerro Negro, we were given our boards and jumpsuits to carry to the top, which wasn't too bad a climb, with a good couple of stops! Cerro Negro is a cinder cone volcano, which leaks lava from the sides and shoots ash out the top(!) it is one of the oldest still active cinder volcanoes in the world, as they usually have a short lifespan of a few decades. At the top, if you scrape your foot in the ash and put your hand down you can feel the heat -
apparently it is overdue an explosion, and the last one was undetected until it happened - then we were told signing our names up had been a waiver haha.
After putting our incredibly flattering orange jumpsuits on, we were shown how to steer and "control" our speed, and the current speed records (95kmh), and then we were off! There were three tracks, and you couldn't see the bottom from the top of any of them - which I think was a bit of a blessing for me, as I was pretty nervous but excited, and definitely didn't need to see the first girl and her apparently spectacular tumble!
Going down took less than a minute, and I was clocked at 32kmh, 5kmh slower than Sam, and half the top speed of the day (60kmh - by the girl who crashed) but it felt like a million miles an hour!
Afterwards everyone got a well earned beer on the truck back and basically it was a super cool morning!
Back at the hostel I realised my phone had been stolen in the two minutes between the truck and the hostel which took up a lot of the
afternoon 😞 the most annoying part is losing all of my photos from the volcano.... Booooo.
After trying and failing to locate my phone, we went out for a beach house party which was really cool - so the next day we decided we'd go back and stay at the beach house for a night.
The waves along the coast are pretty intense so I had a funny morning trying to stay on my feet while paddling/wading - and failed. So now I have sand burn from being dragged by waves on the leg that was bruised from falling off my bike - lots of battle wounds now on display.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.064s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 11; qc: 28; dbt: 0.0356s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb