Holy Volcano Hiking Batman!

Hola! Hay mas fotos (there are more pictures... check it out).

Since Antigua we´ve sort of fallen in love with a place called Xela, it´s a medium-sized city (big by Guatemalan standards) in the highlands. We´ve been here over a week and don´t plan on leaving for another couple. We have been taking spanish school and living with a host family too... there are a lot fewer tourists than in Antigua and a lot more culture, but more on all this later.

One big reason people like us get ¨stuck¨ in Xela is because of its great setting in the western highlands of Guatemala. At about 2200 meters (that´s around 7500 feet kids), Xela is set beautifully in the mountains where the weather is great and there are tons of hiking opportunities. In 10 days we´ve already managed to take 2 opportunities to hike. We did a self-guided half-day hike to a big volcanic rock field called La Muela (¨The Molar¨), but our highlight of the last week was definitely our 2nd major hike of the trip: Volcan Tajumulco!

Central America is famous for its volcanoes, and the Tajumulco is the highest volcano in Central America at 4222 meters or just under 14,000 feet. That´s pretty damn high actually... some problems with clouds and altitude were sure to occur. Regardless, we arranged to go with a tour company called Queztaltrekkers who supplied us with cold weather gear, tents, sleeping pads, water, and food. Tajumulco is a 2 day hike with 1 night camping on the mountain about 600 feet from the summit, so you need to carry everything you need to camp (in cold weather) and drink and eat. If you´re Rich, you need to carry Kendra´s heavy, bulky fleece sleeping bag liner to keep Kendra warm and thus happy on the cold mountain top.

On Saturday morning, we woke up at the wonderful hour of 4:00am to meet up with our group at 4:45. We caught a pickup truck to the bus station, a chicken bus, another chicken bus, and after 4 hours and a portion of rice and beans and fried plantains later we were at the trailhead with our super heavy packs. We walked about 30 minutes up a cobble stone street where eventually the trail left the road and headed into the woods and up, very very up. The hike started at about 3500 meters and for Kendra, and for a lot of others in the group, the altitude began to have an effect immediately. In fact, one girl in our group got sick and had to leave after only abou 10 minutes.

But because we are awesome, we persevered. Despite the altitude and the extremely cloudy weather, we hiked a solid 3 or 4 hours to our campsite, stopping for a delicious lunch prepared by the guides of PBJ´s, rice salad, cole slaw, chips and guacamole. The hike was foggy but the fog created a beautiful misty setting as we hiked through open fields and big trees on the side of the volcano. The trees on Tajumulco grow at the highest altitude of any trees in the world... so technically, they are not the tallest, but they are the highest trees in the world.

When we arrived at camp, we setup our tents and a makeshift kitchen. Because of the clouds we had to forgo heading to the summit that evening to watch the sunset. That was not such an upsetting situation for a number of people, because it was rainy and wet and we all had to get used to the thin air at the high altitude. We spent the afternoon and evening cooking a spaghetti dinner, chasing cows out of our campsite, and hanging out with the fun group of people we were hiking with. We all went to bed very early a bit damp, cold, tired.

The next morning we got up at 3:30am... yes, in the morning. It was pitch black when we hiked the final hour to the summit, we had to use our headlamps and flashlights which was a funky experience. Kendra was having a tough time with the thin air and the weather was still really cloudy so we were worried we wouldn´t have a great view of the sunrise which was supposed to be the highlight of the trip. We got to the summit just as the first light started to appear... and for the first and only time of the entire weekend, the clouds parted and we spent an hour at the summit watching an incredible sunrise over the top of the first cloudline which was far below us.

The views were amazing, it´s the top of a mountain after all, and it was worth all the bad weather and thin air we battled. After sunrise, we hiked back down an incredible ridge from the summit to the campsite. It was really cool to see what we hiked because we hadn´t seen it on the way up in the blackness. We had breakfast and hot drinks with our group, packed up camp, and headed back down. The hike down was beautiful too, through grassy fields and beautiful fields of purple flowers in the foggy woods. Very cool.

¨Hike the Highest Volcano in Central America¨ is officially off our to do list...