I’m staying in Antigua now at a language school. My original intent was not to study Spanish here, but just to visit the volcanoes and stay in Antigua just long enough for that. More about that my next post.

The first day I went to a tour agency and booked a trip to Pacaya. The cost was something like $15 USD for a tourist bus up to the mountain. Then we needed to pay another $6 to enter the park and have a guide escort us up. Not that you needed a guide, but most tourists are happier with a guide.

The group I went up with was a mix of UK’ers/Irishers/Spanish and about 3 other Americans– all fairly young. This was a good group to go with the mountain with because we were all in OK shape, so there wasn’t much waiting. It was nice to be the slow one as opposed to my other guided tour where I was always waiting around.

They picked me up from my guest house at 2pm and proceeded to fill the crappy bus with gringos. The bus was clean but pretty old. Loaded with people, it took about an hour and a half to two hours to get up the volcano. I could have done it on the bike in about 30 minutes. It. was. a. slow. ride. The views were beautiful though.

We hiked for an hour and broke through the forest and saw this:


!!!!!!

So I was pretty excited at this point to be on another volcano. My last volcano encounter was in Hawaii on the big island. To get to lava there, it was an hour horizon hike across a lava field. This time, it was an hour up a horse shit filled track. Almost immediately up arriving at the lava fields, you were on top of this:

LAVA!!!!!!!!!!!

The red glowing stuff is molten rock. I’m pretty sure I sacrificed some eyebrows with the previous shot.

Goal Accomplished: Stand within 1 meter of Lava and get a picture.

Volcan shot 1:

Volcan shot 2:

Shot one or two is going to go on my wall. I spent so long trying to take that picture with my crappy point and shoot balancing on a barbed wire fence that I lost my tour group and had to run down the mountain to catch up.

It was a great hike up and I’d like to do it again, but at night this time so I can get the full effect of a glowing lava field.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! lava!!!!!!!!!!!!!!