Wow, lets just start there.
Last night, Kyle, a dude we met from Seattle named Damian, and I decided to do a moonlight hike up the tallest Volcano that is hugging Xela, Santa Maria is 3772m tall, so over 10,000 feet! There are a number of trekking organizations that would take you up the same mountain but some were going to wait until a full moon, which was in about 4 days? But we were not about to wait around, and we ended up saving a bunch of money (450Q vs 86Q for three people, I think we won). At any rate we talked to a volunteer run organization called QueztalTrekkers, and one of the guys-guides gave us directions on how to get up the mountain. Get a taxi to a small town outside of Xela, have him drop you off at the end of a road, walk up the road-path for about 30-45minutes then take a left at the spikey trees (yuccas)and then walk for about 20 more minutes until the trash heap, take a right and walk up the mountain! Easy as pie right? Good landmarks and a solid time schedule, but it all changes when your driver doesnt drop you off at the same place that the other Trekkers start from. So after wandering around the base of Santa Maria, where we knew we needed to head up, but couldn´t fine a trail, we had to back track and ended up stumbling on the right trail, we found the Spikey plants! and then the trash heap!
So after about a 2 hour delay finding the actual trail we headed up the mountain proper. And when I say up it was basically a stair stepper, with pointless switchbacks and lots of rocks in the trail to trip weary, tired, and headlamp trekkers.
The trail was not as bad as San Pedro but similar strain on the muscles. We reached the top after many breaks and battling through being light headed and dizzy, wow that will happen when you hike up to 10,000ft! And broke the trees to reach the summit. It was pretty spectacular in the dark but damn was it cold, wind made it even more chilly, and intelligent Jon had hiked up with shorts (along with all my warm weather uppers). So we froze at the top for about half an hour (good thing we didnt find the trail right away or we would have been up there for 2 hours freezing!) And then watched the sun peak over the horizon, over clouds, mountains, through mist and let it brighten up our day! The view was simply amazing and we got many pictures of the surrounding hills, mountains, sleepy Xela, and ourselves shivering in our ill prepared ´warm clothes´ 
As and added bonus we were actually looking right down on the most active volcano in Guatemala, Santiaguito. Which erupted while we were there on the summit of Santa María. There was also a group of people from Buffalo (university?) who had a infrared camera trained on the crater and we got to watch and learn a bit about this unique volcano. It has basically a lava plug that erupts with gases and ash about every 1.5hours and all that gas and ash shoots out from the ring around the plug, it was really cool to watch this from the infrared camera picking up the heat signature!
And then we hiked down. I dont know about all of you but I am not a big fan of the constant pounding on the knees and joints when you are down hiking, I would much rather do uphill, but we needed to get down so down we went. We finally reached the bottom and walked right on to a bus that was headed to Xela for 2Q! wahooo, much better than the taxi ride at midnight. And once we got into Xela, Kyle and I about fell asleep looking for food, we found a nice little place on the corner of Parque Central America and ate like kings for 18Q.
After that it was time to find our hostel again and hit the sack, we had gotten little sleep the night before so we will be trying to play catchup for the next few days I think.
Anyway that is all for now, (¡spoiler!)stay tuned for a few pictures in the next few days!
Love you all
No comments:
Post a Comment