taco's & toucan's travels ~ 2019

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DAY 46

Week 7

ANTIGUA GUATEMALA (Sacatepéquez, GTM)

Monday April 29^th, 2019

TODAYS MILEAGE – 72 miles / 116 kilometres

TRIP MILEAGE – 19,665 miles / 31,648 kilometres

I had to wake up the Hotel Posada De Los Bucaros night porter/front desk team member to get out of the hotel around 4AM to wander the streets with the camera firmly in hand. My wandering took me over to the Iglesia de la Merced (La Merced Church), Arco de Santa Catalina (Santa Catalina Arch) and the Plaza Mayor where they had set up the United Buddy Bears exhibition.

The exhibition entails 144 two metre (6½ foot) tall fibreglass bears painted in representation of every country in the world, usually by one of their own renowned and respected local artists. The bears are meant to reflect the world coming together as one with the same ideals, goals and understanding, while promoting living together in peace and harmony on their global tour.

Breakfast was pretty decent bagel and coffee at The Bagel Barn, before I headed back to the hotel to catch up with the G crew. At 9AM all five of us strolled over to the La Tortilla Cooking School and then over to peruse the local Mercados Centrales (Central Markets) to gather the ingredients to make lunch for ourselves.

The menu consisted of the local Chicken Pepián main dish and a Rellenitos de Platano dessert made of mashed plantains surrounding a cocoa & bean paste filling and then shallow fried. This was accompanied with a couple of glasses of a really good white wine, that I didn't the name of – pity.

We got collected at 1:30 by OX Expeditions to check out the 2,522 metre (8,370 foot) and growing – Volcán de Pacaya (Pacaya Volcano) that is actually active. The plan was to hike 3.2 kilometres (2 miles) to the base, roast some marshmallows, watch the sunset and then drive home through the other three volcanos in the area – de Agua, de Fuego and de Acatenango.

We’d barely got going on the 50 kilometres (31 mile) 1¾ hour drive to San Vicente Pacaya, when both myself and a Spanish speaking passenger spoke to the driver (for want of a better word) as to why he was driving like he’d stolen the bus with us in it and was fleeing a bank robbery, while us passengers felt like laundry on agitate cycle in the washer. At one point he was taking the twisty/winding posted 40 KPH mountain roads at 60-70KPH and the tires were howling in protest while he was visibly pedalling hard to keep it on the road. When questioned, his response was ‘New Tires'.

After another gobful from us, he slowed down to a pedestrian pace that was ½ the pace of traffic flow. It was at this point he decided to go full on fuktard by “brake checking” i.e. bouncing his foot on and off the brake pedal, lurching all of us backwards and forwards with monotonous routine. I’d had enough and simply said “Pull over and I’ll drive or ..... keep carrying on like this and I’m going to bitch slap you in the left ear”, which I believe was translated somewhat correctly as he looked at me somewhat wide-eyed, but his driving improved markedly and with immediate effect.

It’d be fair to say that it was a bit of hard yakka legging it the 2 hours to the base of Pacaya. Our first glimpse was a ribbon of red lava snaking its way down face of the ever changing volcanic mountain. It’s a barren, eerie and unique wasteland environment that the only sounds were the winds and molten car-size boulders coming done the various slopes. There were no real odours to that which I’d encountered at other natural geo-thermic sites, i.e. New Zealand and Hawaii.

We got close enough to toast marshmallows on one of the small flow lines, but your clacker valve would pucker up when hearing the thunderous sounds of something coming from above.

When the sun went down, the ambient temperature went with it, plummeting to the point of having to rug up. That small inconvenience was overshadowed by being able to see all of the lava flows, all of the rolling balls of molten mass and the eruptions spewing out of the peak of the volcano – Mother Nature put on one spectacular show. Absolutely incredible - one of those “You Have To Be There” moments.

As with any adventure in getting there – you have to get back. Armed with little more than headlamps of various luminescence, we headed back the National Park entrance in pitch black darkness in which I had only one slip that the Russian judges scored at "8.2 for entertainment, but lacking grace."

Our day guides efforts in blowing up one of the OX Expeditions managers phones had resulted in a new bus and we were all pleased to say – a professional driver. The 63 kilometre (40 mile) 1½ hour trip home on an alternate route via Antigua’s back door was one in which the silence was only broken by the sounds of soft snoring. We got home around 9:30PM after nearly running out of fuel, which facilitated the need for a quick "splash & dash" at a local servo and seeing as I could eat the arse feathers off a low flying duck, I legged it from the hotel for a quick feed and a cerveza or three.