Adventures in Central America: Volcan Pacaya, Guatemala

I had an early start this morning, up at 5:30 and out the hostel gate by 5:40.  I was splitting the day between two trips outside of Antigua, and this morning I was headed to Volcan Pacaya, one of three active volcanoes in Guatemala.

I joined another $10 shuttle, this one more like a bus (there must have been almost twenty of us), and we headed out of Antigua as the sun rose.

An hour and a half later, or so, we were in the village of San Francisco de Sales, just outside of the Volcan Pacaya Park.

Each of us paid a 50 quetzales entrance fee and our group was assigned two guides.  The one I became friendly with was a young guy named Kevin, and he is Mayan, as is everyone in his village, he said (although he also told me no one in his village speaks their Mayan language anymore, but some older people in other nearby villages do).

We began the ascent, strung out along the trail.

Pacaya last erupted in 2014, but it remains active, so really the hike is not up to the top of the volcano (which is considered too dangerous to take tourists too); rather, we hiked for about an hour and a half to a point where we were in an ideal spot to view the volcano (basically we climbed to a ridge which is more or less where vegetation stops and the lava field begins).

Kevin told me in another hour we could be at the top, which surprised me, because it looked much further.  He showed me video he had taken a couple of weeks ago at nighttime when he and his friends went up.  Close up and at a night, the hot lava was orange and bubbling and dominated his smartphone screen.  Today, I could see hot lava, but only barely.  What was easy to see was the smoke billowing from the crater.

The cooled, black, hardened lava absolutely covered the mountain and created a field in front of us.  We descended a small slope to the lava field.    

We hiked over a small portion of the lava field, then stopped at a particular place, where Kevin pulled a rock from a crack in the lava and passed it to me.  It was so hot, I couldn't hold it in one hand for long!  Kevin pulled out small sticks and marshmallows and we roasted them in this little crevice.  Even with the marshmallow on the end of a stick my knuckles were getting uncomfortably hot.  I was really amazed, because on the surface the lava was cool.  

After our marshmallows we headed back down the mountain.  The group became much less cohesive on the descent, and I ended up traveling most of the way down with another single guy about my age in the group, who said he's an injured NHL player who travels to a new country every week while he's recuperating from a back injury.  I didn't ask for his name, and when I Googled him later some things didn't seem to add up, so I'm not so sure his story was for real.  But who knows; it was an interesting and fairly elaborate story even if it was all a lie.

 Back at the parking lot we re-boarded the bus and headed back to Antigua.