Defying The Angry Mountain God

Our last long bus journey of 8 hours got us across the country to Guatamala City for a quick overnight stay, then a short bus ride to Antigua. These are colourful local buses, generally an antique American school bus, converted to hold an astonishing number of Guatemalans on seats designed for children.

Antigua is a postcard-pretty town of pleasantly crumbling terracotta and yellow buildings and completely crumbled churches. It’s ringed by mountains, with the skyline dominated by a large cone-shaped volcano, like volcanoes should be (but often aren’t).

Antigua used to be the capital, until the Spanish got scared of eruptions and legged it east to found Guatemala City. The main square is an attractive, shady space with colonial buildings and a pretty church, where you can relax and observe local life and spot the Australian backpacker in it’s natural habitat.

Essentially, Antigua is now a tourist town thronged with internet cafés, hotels and some excellent tat shops. There’s also a lot of jewellery, particularly jade unique to the area.

But it’s the volcanoes most people come for, including us. Yet another early start then, with the 6am pickup for Volcano Pacaya.

The climb began through light forest on a foothill, giving us stunning views of two volcanoes across the valley – one of which was belching smoke. Pacaya was angered by our presence too, a low, loud rumble indicating his displeasure.

We continued on for a relatively steep and taxing climb through the trees for about 90 minutes. Eventually we broke out of the tree line, and Pacaya presented himself: a great hulk of black lava rock to the front and towering above us.

We rested for a while to catch our breath and allow more space between us and the group in front, then set off onto the volcano itself.

We descended into dark, gravelly ash, past a huge hulk of lava rock from the last eruption 8 months ago. Then we began to ascend again, picking and scrabbling our way slowly across a black lunar landscape of ash, gravel and loose lava rocks. By this time, the sun was breaking through the clouds hugging the crater. I thought to myself that the heat of the sun was uncomfortable for hiking, unaware that it wasn’t the sun I could feel.

The climb took just under an hour until I spotted a triangle of glowing red lava visible between the rocks, about 15 metres away. I assumed this was as close to the lava flow as we’d get but we kept going further round.

Suddenly the heat became quite intense, more so with each step. And there in front was the red hot lava flowing surprisingly quickly down the slope. I got within 4 metres of the flow, amazed and in awe of the intense heat shimmering around me. To get the requisite photo of ‘me and lava’, I stepped over a shallow crack a little closer. But although it was only half a metre or less, I couldn’t have stayed longer than a single pose. The heat was unbelievable. A cliché it may be, but sometimes they’re spot on; it was like being in an oven, painful on my exposed skin after a minute or two.

I was amazed at how close we could get to this incredible and unstoppable force. To prove a point, our guide ventured down the slope to within a metre of the lava. Shielding his face, his features grimmaced with the pain of the heat, he touched the lava with a wooden pole one of the group had used for walking. Instantly, it burst into flames.

With the heat, and the unpredictable nature of the mountain god’s wrath, we couldn’t stay long.

The descent was pretty easy, though mildly nerve-wracking, gravity and loose gravel working in unity to turn a hike into a slide.