19th of February
The three of us accomplished the famous two days Acatenango trek. Starting yesterday (supposedly) in the morning, we got delayed as on the way up to the starting point our bus blew off one of the radiator’s water pipe.. We stood on the side of the road for about 30 minutes waiting for another bus to come pick us up. That is a very local experience, the kind of stuff that often happens in Latinoamérica and well, no big deal.. It is a core memory ! Standing on the side of the road, bus stopped in the middle of a curve, and each and every one of us took the opportunity to go take a pee in the bush near the broken bus. This sort of even happening in a third world country brings up a sort of adventurous side for everyone.
The first part of the trek was pretty smooth once finding our rythm. Charlie and I often leading the head of the group. Biggest “seebs” was to have to wait for the people at the back walking incredibly slowly as they played paparazzi the whole time..
After all, we made our way up to the base camp. Beautiful blue sky, way up above the sea of clouds, in front of us he suddenly appeared : Volcán de Fuego, blowing an eruption in a big smoky cloud. We now know who we’re dealing with, reminding us that we are visitors only on his land.
A short break taken, we head towards Fuego. A 45 minutes walk down to reach the point where Acatenango and Fuego join, to then going up for about an hour.
We reach as high as 250m away from the erupting crater, almost 4000m above sea level.. here the magic happens.. Fluo orange lava blown up in the dark sky with a growling sound.
An hour up there watching the magic happening before our eyes before we turn around to head back to the base camp.
Fun walk back, although tiring. Charlie & I in front, finding the right path to lead the group.
We did a pretty good job, except for that one time where we got got caught up with our chatting and ended up following two guys from another group. They were obviously lost.. We didn’t realize it at the time until they suddenly turned around and say “There is a cliff, that’s not the way”. Curious, we asked them where they were going and they answered “Oh, we’re lost. Our group is long long gone”.
Obviously that induced some laughing for us both. Now the way back the original track was to jump over a trench.. Pretty fun to get lost on an active volcano in Guatemala..!
The group was fine though as they were a bit behind, they could just change their course to easily join the path again.
The way back up on Acatenango was EXHAUSTING after so much walking, everyone had packed a lot of snacks and nuts and what not, whereas we had a snickers bar each and that was it..
Charlie and I animated the whole walk distracting the close by people attending our show. Rebekah was walking with us and laughed to our exhibition.
One of the feature of the animated exhibition was to be sarcastically called “Mr Genius” by a teenager wearing Spiderman gloves.
In the meantime, our journey being blessed by Fuego’s entrails surfacing to glow in the dark sky. Lava bursting connecting us to the deep roots of the underground.
moiettoi 