- Volcán Pacaya
At the time of our trek to Volcán Pacaya, we had heard reports of recent activity. Walking through the forest, we could hear the distant booming of the active volcano, erupting every minute or so.
After an hour, we get to the edge of the mountain, and look out onto the fiery volcano that we will soon be ascending. Do you see that little lump off to the left? That is our destination. It's maybe 100m (330ft) from the rim of the crater. Here's a close up.
Walking up the steep, pebbly slope as the volcano throws great blobs of molten lava high into the air. At this stage not only are we tired from the hike to the base of the volcano, not only is the sun relentlessly beating down on us, but to make things even harder, for every two steps we gain, we slip down one.
We were able to get really close, maybe about 100m (110 yards) from the rim. The volcano blew molten rocks way up into the air, which usually landed about half way between us and the crater. At one stage, though, the volcano gave a really big blast which threw the rocks clear over our heads. If anything had have landed on us, even small stuff, it would have surely done quite a bit of injury.
We stayed until the sun went down. We were in just the right position to see it set into the volcano - quite fitting I thought.
And as it did, the lava appeared all the more brighter against the darkening sky.
In contrast to going up the volcano, which had large, sharp chunks of volcanic rock which we used for foot support, we came back down along a route which had very fine (and light, as volcanic rock is) sand which was at almost the maximum angle that the sand could support. This was conducive to a very fun, and fast run down without too much risk of cutting ourselves if we fell. With striding leaps of around 3m each the speed we picked up was impressive, each step being more trying to keep control of the speed than to gain it. We finished up with quite a lot of black sand in our shoes.
About one week after I made the climb, the volcano erupted, throwing volcanic ash miles into the air. All that day it rained thick black ash in Guatemala City, 45km (28Mi) away.
