Volcano Pacaya!

One of the most popular things to do from Antigua is climb the Volcano Pacaya, it's the active volcano I mentioned in my previous post.

They take you about halfway up in a bus then a guide leads you to the summit which takes about 1.5 hours. It's a pretty steep hike though woods, but the path is good so it isn't too knackering. On reaching the lava field the scenery changes completely to black volcanic rubble and smoke. It'd be really easy to get lost, since everything looks exactly the same, so big white splats of paint a put here and there to show the path. Still it's not the easiest of routes to follow as its easy to slip on the rubble and the rocks are razor sharp.

After a while following the path you start to get hot blasts of air (it was starting to get cold on the trek up) and looking down at your feet you can sometimes see a red hot glow through the cracks. Everyone starts to look a little more serious at this point, as the prospect of falling into lava isn't a very nice one, but it doesn't seem to bother the guide who happily takes shortcuts from the marked path and throws boulders at cooling lava so fresh stuff spills out.

Eventually we reached the top, and although it wasn't the raging torrent of lava I was hoping to see, it was a pretty impressive sight. Unfortunately, it was starting to get dark so we had a few minutes to take photos and then nervously picked our way back over the lava fields to the trail.

Next, I'm going to Lake Attitlan for a couple of days whilst Amy finishes up her studies on the Pacific coast, then we're off to Honduras!