Pacaya Volcano

So I'll do my best to pick up from where I left off. Tuesday we got up dark and early (before sunrise) to catch the 6:00 am shuttle to the Pacaya volcano. It's about a two hour ride to the volcano, and then an hour and a half hike to the not-quite-summit. Kristian and I were cracking up the whole ride to the volcano due to the interesting soundtrack we had on the bus...I think we heard an entire Avril Levine album (the one with Sk8r Boy), plus a bunch of pop-reggae, including the "cops" theme song (bad boys, bad boy, whatcha gonna do?). The hike up the volcano was steep...the guide told us we went from 1800 to 2400 meters to get to the area where we could see the lava flows. According to an online conversion thingy, we climbed from 5,900 ft. to about 7,800 ft. I could really feel the altitude...catching my breath consisted of a lot of gasping and coughing. The city of Antigua, where I'm staying at the moment, is about 5,000 ft. up in the mountains. Much of the trail was straight up, and our legs were burning after only about ten minutes of hiking. Some of the locals followed us up on horseback in order to sell rides up the mountain for those who were unprepared for the climb.

There are three other volcanoes in the vicinity of the Pacaya volcano: Agua, Fuego, and Acatenango. The Acatenango volcano is in the foreground of this photo. In the middle is the Agua volcano, and the the left is Fuego, which is also active. We could see billows of smoke coming from it's peak every once in a while. The view was absolutely amazing.

The Pacaya volcano is an active volcano, and our final destination was the lava flows themselves, on the far side. First we skidded down a sandy area in order to get to an area of sharp pumice (at least I think that's what it's called). We had to climb over the hardened, cooled lava for quite a ways, until finally we made it to the actual red hot lava that was oozing slowly down the side of the mountain. For those of you who don't know, I've got a bit of vertigo, and the climb kind of freaked me out. The slope was pretty steep, and I almost didn't make it all the way to the lava itself. I was the last person in our group to get close to the lava...we were literally two feet away from it. You could feel the heat in the air, and the lava I was standing on melted the rubber on the soles of my shoes (not enough to completely ruin them, but there really aren't any treads on the soles anymore). Kristian took some video of the lava with my camera. The noise you can hear on the video isn't the lava itself, which was very quiet, but the wind.

Here's the best part of the story...two days after we hiked the volcano, we met some Brits at Lake Atitlan who had some nasty looking bandages on their arms and legs. When we asked them how they had been injured, they told us that they had been hiking the Pacaya volcano the same day that we had, but a few hours later. While they were hiking the volcano erupted and sent boiling hot lava straight down towards them as they were traversing across the razor sharp pumice on the way to see the usually sedate lava flow that we had seen only a few hours earlier. The group of about 20 people had to flee for their lives across the hardened lava, and many were cut up pretty badly by the rocks. But other than a dislocated shoulder, a bunch of cuts needing stitches, and some minor burns, no one was seriously injured.

That afternoon, after we got back from the volcano, we bummed around Antigua for a while and then hopped a shuttle to Panajachel, on Lake Atitlan. I'll post some more later about that. At some point I'll actually catch up to where I am now. I hope you are all doing well! Until later, then...