staring down an active volcano

Yesterday, I peered into the mouth of an active volcano. With the lung-singeing smoke swirling around me, and three people tightly grasping me, I leaned over the edge of the volcano. As the wind moved the smoke, I could see a bright orangish red lava below. It was amazing.

We arrived in Antigua, Guatemala Saturday afternoon after a 6 hour ride in a tiny knee-cramping bus. It's very different from Copan, and considering that we have been feeling very nostalgic for the place where we just spent nearly a month, we didn't fall in love with Antigua. In fact, we were a little surprised how hard it was to leave Copan. I guess we hadn't realized how much we had built up this community of friends and peers and family (although I do not miss Juancho, and the goodbyes with my family were short and pressed). We always had people to hang out with and place to go, and always when we walked down the street, we were waving at people we knew. Now we are tourists, which we are finding is a tough transition. I think it's making us all homesick, since we no longer have the comfort of a home base.

That said, we hiked to the top of Volcan Pakaya in Antigua, which next to the horse back riding (which we did one last time before leaving Copan), was one of the best days on our trip. (Side note on the horseback riding: When we went Friday, Don Beto took us to the Frontera, near the border of Guatemala, where we pretty much had free reign to gallop with the lush green mountains spreading out in front of us. Truly breathtaking. I was riding Muneca, who I had grown quite close to, and all the horses were excited to have the room to run. Now I am toying with the idea of one day moving to a farm with horses and land and veggies and whatnot. We'll see.)

The hike to the top was roughly three hours, with the last hour being more of a scramble than a climb. One step forward, two slides backward. It was so hard, unbelievably steep, and much like climbing an escalator the wrong way. But all of the scramble was worth it when we reached the top, where we could see Guatemala City, three other volcanoes, one of which was also active and steaming from the top, fantastically green pastures, and of course, the depths of this massive volatile mountain. We were surrounded by vivid yellow, red and white rocks from the chemicals, and our guide pointed out several craters from recent erruptions, one three months ago, and a more intense one in 2000.

After resting a bit, we ran down the top part of the volcano, digging our heels into the dark ash dirt and sliding down. It was amazing.

We are trying our best to use our Spanish, but Antigua is painfully toursity and we are meeting more people from other parts of the world (which is cool in its own way, yes), but few that are fluent in Spanish. We did talk to the guide and a woman we met who weaves tapestries, but it's tough to find more opportunities to practice. We have tried to institute time during the day to talk in Spanish, but we'll see. I just don't want to loose all that we have worked so hard on.