Awesome bicycle rail at Jungle Party

After finishing up some blogging and getting well rested, Mateo and I went out to explore Antigua.

Templo y Convento de Nuestra Señra del pilar de Zaragoza

What a beautiful colonial town, tomorrow we plan to hike up to a volcano, Pacaya. It is an active volcano, it last really erupted five years ago, and it’s most recent small eruption was in March. I was excited to hike and to visit a volcano. Everyone from the hostel was going to a giant party outside of town Mateo and I were not interested but we were excited about having the hostel to ourselves. We sat and chatted with Luis one of the employees at Jungel party. Nate, Mateo’s brother had made friends with him just a couple weeks before when he was visiting Guatemala. He is a funny character and very entertaining, he invited us to the party so we joined him when he was finished with the hostel. The party was horrible, just really bad and it was out side, the night was cold. Mateo and I gave it a shot but we were not feeling it and just as we began to leave, Volcano Fuego began erupting, you could see blasts of lava coming out the top clear as day. The volcano erupting made our trip out to a horrible party all worth it. In the morning we tried to catch a tour at 8 but we would have needed to sign up the day before so we went looking about for breakfast and ran in to Luis and Phil I invited them to joins us and instead we joined them in the cooking of breakfast back at the hostel. We were not allowed technically to use the the kitchen being guests but they were staff so us joining them was no problem. We had an awesome Guatemalan breakfast with our friends and we convinced Phil to join us on the 2 o’clock volcano tour. We walked around until it was time to leave around an awesome historic sight of a church that had full collapsed in the 1976 earth quake. The sight was completely open for climbing all over the rubble and exploring. It wasn’t like Europe where every tourist was closely watched to make sure no finger prints were left behind.

Monasterio Y Templo De La Recolección

It was a blast. The bus ride out to the hike was about an hour and a half south. The clouds were out and I wasn’t sure if we would have a view. The hike was nearly straight up, took the wind out of me at first. I miss the bike but at the same time it has been so nice to get as much exercise as we have been getting. There were amazing views as we reached the top, we had views of all three volcanos. hiking through the lava field you could feel the heat from the geothermal layers of the volcano. I even roasted a marshmallow from just a hole in the ground.

Volcano Time, Pacaya

Mallow roasting

View of the other three volcanos, Fuego, Agua, and Acatenango

Mateo and Phil enjoying the view on the hike down