Mmmm... hot liquid magma
This entry was posted on 2/17/2007 9:10 PM and is filed under Guatemala.
ANTIGUA - I'll preface this by saying I'm not sure how safe and/or smart this was... but we climbed a volcano today. Oh, I meant to say an active volcano. I think folks do this sort of thing all the time in Hawaii but something tells me the safety standards here in Guatemala are - shall we say - a little more 'lax'. And by 'lax' I mean 'nonexistent'. Nevertheless, it was the best seven bucks I've spent in a while.
The volcano we climbed is called Pacaya... it's one of the most popular which also means the security is fairly good (read - less chance of getting mugged). It erupted a few months ago and left a bunch of crusty slag all over the place. Here's a look at the three volcanoes in the area, Pacaya, Antigua and Agua.
From the end of the access road it was a 2 km climb up a dirty, dusty, horse-poop-filled path with the last 1/2 kilometer or so through some lethally sharp and very hot crusty stuff. It was tricky climbing, but to see the molten lava sloughing off the mountain was incredible...
About now we were getting awfully close to the hot stuff. I nearly fell into this crack and died. Ok, maybe that's a small exaggeration, but you can see my foot right there above all that very red goo.
Some folks brought marshmallows and stuff for making grilled cheese. These three Israeli guys brought a pot of water and some coffee... held it over this pit for a few moments and it was done. They nearly lost their pot.
In the photo below, we were so close I could feel my feet and leg hair burning... and yes, that's a pile of oozing earth right in front of us. Right about here was when I started thinking it's probably not great to be breathing in volcano gasses. Right about here was also when Anna realized her shoes had begun to melt. Whoops! They'd gotten so hot that the glue holding the soles had softened and the upper had nearly come off. Time to get a move on!!
All in all, it was a little sketchy but we had a fantastic time. Anna also loved that it gave her with an excuse to do a little shoe shopping the next day!
