Up another volcano!

More crazy fun and games. Someone decided that it would be a good idea to climb one of the local volcanoes, Volcan Agua (3776 meters!).

Unfortunately the photographs are all stuck inside my phone and it doesn´t want to give them up at the moment. So you´ll have to use your imaginations and my excellent prose.

We left Anitgua at about 6:30am and jumped into the back of a pick up truck which took us up to base of the volcano. The streets round here aren´t exactly flat so it was a bit of an exciting trip.

We were dropped off in a small town and started out walk up. After about an hour we reached the base of the clouds and took a bit of a breather. We then started to climb up through the clouds. Occasional the mist was so thick that you could barely make out the path and at one point we lost the path and started some fairly hardcore bouldering up the mountain side until we regained the path.

After about 2 hours of climbing we broke through the clouds into brilliant sunshine the air got pretty thin at this point and it was a real struggle for us to keep going (definitely not as fit as I used to be). Another hour of climbing and we reached to crater of the volcano. Some mad maniac has actually built a shack there and lives in the volcano crater!

We spent about an hour or so having lunch and walking around the crater. There are a huge number of radio antennas on the rim and a few maintenance staff live up there. It´s actually quite a mess. But the views are amazing. I have photos of the clouds from above with volcanos poking up through them. The clouds also started to break up a bit so we could look down onto Guatemala city and Antigua which was pretty amazing.

Coming back down the mountain seemed to take forever so I´ll skip over it as it was a bit boring.

To get back to Antigua we took a chicken bus. I´ll write more about these another time. But it was certainly an interesting experience...

Tomorrow a bunch of people I´ve been hanging out with are heading off home or onto other destinations. And it´s my birthday on Saturday. Woe is me.