Pacaya is an active volcano. Hubert set up the tour. Patrika and Carmen stayed home. Aaron and I woke up early, picked up sandwiches from the nearby panaderia, and joined everyone else in the tour van (Rachel, Hubert, JC, Patres).

The hike is very strenuous, and Guatemala’s altitude doesn’t help. At the very beginning of the hike, we were given a few offers:

• The bus driver offered to be our hiking guide, to get us through the jungle to the volcano. This was a no-brainer to accept; we didn’t want to get lost in the jungle.
• At the bottom of the trail, we were accosted by local kids offering to rent us hiking sticks for Q5. We hemmed and hawwed, but this also turned out to be a near-necessity.

The very beginning of the hike is a very steep climb up a rock trail. Two locals with horses followed us up, offering horse rides for the hike. When none of us succumbed to the hike, the horsemen turned back. But we’d find that it wouldn’t have been a bad deal, and the numerous horse droppings along the trail ahead was evidence that others had thought the same thing.

At this point, the rock “pavement” stopped, and we were hiking on dirt paths. One thing about the hiking trails here is that the switchbacks aren’t as developed as in “tourist” paths in the States; one hikes much more directly uphill or downhill. This means that the hike is steeper, and that the paths are more slickly dangerous (more mud from erosion and the wet weather). It was a tough climb to the top, but the views were worth it.

Once over the top, we descended into the volcano to look at some lava. It was really neat. Apparently people bring marshmallows to roast over the lava; we hadn’t brought any. The ground was hot; some people had worn regular sneakers for the hike, and their soles had partially melted. Also, the descent emphasized that we were far away from American tourist spots and waiver forms and lawyers. Any slip on the many loose rocks would result in an injury far away from the nearest transport out of the volcano and even further away from decent medical care. As a side note, there were pictures in some other tour agencies in Antigua with photos of nighttime hikes. The pictures they had of people next to lava pits glowing in the dark were really nice, but in retrospect it just seems crazy to do a hike like that at night, with rain, low-visibility, steam, muddy trails, loose rocks, and now a lack of daylight?

On the way back, it started to rain. The rain vaporized into a cloud of steam, which was also really neat. We also lost all visibility, which was not so neat, and also dangerous, when you are trying to navigate your way back out of a lava pit over loose rocks. Once out, we also discovered the rain had made much of the paths very slickly muddy; the hiking sticks proved to be very useful. We all survived to make it back down to the bottom for a picture with our guide Miguel:

We got back to Antigua before dinner, but that hike exhausted me; it was a luxurious relief to end the day at a 5-star hotel for shower and early bedtime. “Early to bed and early to rise” would turn out to be an unanticipated theme of this whole trip.