Hot Times

From El Salvador we headed north to Antigua, Guatemala. You might have heard of this place at your local Starbucks. For those of you who a fans of the bean, this place has amazing coffee. It's a great little colonial city that's been overrun by tourist in the last few years. Therefore, it has a strange authentic yet manufactured feel. Hence, great food, cool shops, tons of spanish schools and higher than normal prices...but we'd totally recommend a visit to anybody.

This city is nestled between three different volcanoes. Believe it or not we took the opportunity to climb one of them...Volcan Pacaya. Well, given our last two run-ins with robbery, we had to cough up the money for two new pairs of shoes, but it was completely worth it.

The initial part of the hike up was super steep. Brandon and I think that these Guatemaltecos are smarter than many give them credit for. While we were hiking up this steep section, men were following us with horses taunting, "Taxi, nececita un taxi? Horse is bueno." Let me tell you, hiking at altitude when you've been at sea level for the last couple months isn't so easy on the lungs. We toughed through the really steep section and made it to the more reasonably inclined trail without caving in for a "taxi"...but there were plenty of others who took the men up on their offers.

After about an hour and a half of hiking we arrived to the lava crusted section of the volcano. Our guide informed us that this volcano had been oozing lava regularly since April of 2006. We walked over some hardened rivers that had been running hot just the day before...Pretty cool (or should I say hot?)

Finally, we made it up to hot magma. We were able to get about ten feet away until we felt like a marshmallow on the fourth of July :)

As the sun started to set, the lava started to look more and more impressive. The darker it got, the brighter the lava looked. At points the situation seemed kind of sketchy because pieces of hot lava rocks would break from the river and topple down the volcano...in our direction. Luckily, nobody was hit, but our guide did inform us that if we found ourselves in the path of one of these hot boulders we should run...sounded like a fail proof plan to us.

We stayed at the lava rivers until night fall and then hiked down the volcano in the dark. Mind you there were horses (taxis) on this trail earlier...hence we stepped in lots of horse crap on the way down. Horse crap aside, it truly was a great experience to be able to experience the power of the earth in such close range.