Trying to extinguish a volcano
Sunday was my second night in Antigua and I went to watch films with Irish Liam, Kiwi Melissa, Italian Omar and Aussie Larissa – oh it´s a muticultural life on the road; I´ve met more nationalities in seven weeks than George Bush even knows exist! While watching the Big Lebowski who should walk into the bar but Maria, the Dane I´d met back in Belize. She was on her way home from Honduras and stopped in for a few days before catching her flight home; my world is ever-shrinking!
After lunch on tuesday in the Rainbow cafe (as hippy as it sounds but very nice), Maria and myself joined a tour to climb the nearby Volcán Pacaya. Antigua is surrounded by several volcanoes but Pacaya is the only active one, so with the prospect of potential death this seemed like the obvious choice. Now I´ve heard of friends climbing volcanoes before and it always sounds like a cool adventure, but they never tell you what a bastard it is to climb up!
After two hours of exhaustion at altitude, sweating like the proverbial pig, I made it to the top to find this crazy landscape from another planet. The vent at the top of the cone was breathing in and out with it´s toxic sulphurous breath and looking down into the lava made the hard climb all worth it, though the heat almost took my face off. I topped it off by taking a piss at the top of the volcano; mother would be so proud of what a classy boy I´ve turned out to be! The descent was much more of a pleasure, taking a third of the time and being akin to skiing down a mountain as we ran/slid down the volcanic ash covered cone. It´s hard to say whether I´ll go through all that again on another volcano as it was tough, but I guess there´s still other options to explore for disgracing myself at high altitude, so I never say never.
After a good evening out in a greek restaurant listening to the same song on the scratched CD ten times (better than it sounds) it was time to say goodbye to the Aussie/Kiwi/Italian/Irish contingent. It´s so hard saying goodbye all the time, but I may bump into Melissa again in South America sometime next year, and Omar and myself hatched a plot to take Brazil together in January leading up to Carnival – bring on the dancing girls!
Tags: Antigua, Central America, Guatemala, Guatemala, Pacaya, Travel, volcano
Ed
I’m going to subscribe to the RSS feed of all posts tagged with piss. Class.
i don’t think you dance like a girl…not normally anyway
(p.s. that’s you gwyn, class all the way)
Thanks Andy, I would like to point out that I didn´t mean than Omar and myself would be the dancing girls, and no I don´t dance like a girl, I´m not that good!
That waiter saw you coming a mile off didnt he.
So is there any flange on the horizon, I bet theres loads in Brazil!
Jason