We're going on a bear hunt...

6am...2 hours from the summit. I don't have any good pictures of the nighttime... was too tired and also too distracted to take any. Also the fog = all white pictures.

Final climb...


Mmm...above the clouds. So beautiful.

9 am. Heading down...Literally holding onto the grass to keep from sliding away. Look how steep!

This was one of 3 times we had to literally belay ourselves with vines backwards down these little chutes in the woods. It was an almost complete drop down...so sketchy. And so muddy. And so many bugs and leaves down my shirt.

Corn feilds = 2 hour marker from the bus. Conquered Volcan de Agua in the background.

______________________

This weekend I hiked Volcan de Agua. We left Guate at 9:30 on Saturday, were hiking by 12am and reached the base at 6pm on Sunday. It ended up being 17 hours in total I believe...with a half hour to sleep at the top. I was (still am...sadly) exhausted. But it was incredible. I thought it was going to be a tourist style hike but it turned out to be a group of about 35 Guate natives who do this as a hobby...most of them are on Volcano number 5 this year...some on number 25, (of the 35+ in Guatemala). So...sad for Sula. I was the butt of literally every joke...luckily I didn't understand most of them, elswise my self-esteem may just have hit rock bottom. I thought that the purpose of hiking at night was to catch the sunrise at the summit....wrong. After picking up 3 fully armed police men in Antigua on the way to the Volcano (they hiked the whole thing with us, in full uniform with gun in holster), and being ordered to be completely silent for the first 2 hours of the hike, (so no one would know we were going up there) I learned that the reason to do it an night is for safety purposes. Apparently there are tons of robberies on the volcano because the hike is so popular. I thought this was bizarre...but after the first 2 hours of hiking through a literal garbage dump (stray dogs and sewer smell to boot) this seems very plausible, and I was thankful for the police escort. Because the bus can't make it up to the base, the first couple hours are sort of sketch...i'm not exactly sure where we were because it was dark, but it was definitely not a pleasant wilderness area.

I'm going to try to explain in pictures...it makes me exhausted to try to put into words. The hike up was all night...after scrambling through a foot of mud and rocks, literally if you looked up from the "trail" for a minute you were flat on your face, we reached the summit at 8. The last 2 hours were completely gruelling and are a total blur...combination of no sleep and high altitude make for very hard brain usage. We ate and slept for a half hour at the summit and then hiked down, another 8 hours (it was supposed to take 4). Our guide decided to take an alternate route...resulting in complete tarzan style bamboo jungle no trail massive bug consumption and leaves in my shirt hike for 6 hours of mayhem in the bushes....it was like tele skiing sort of, just hanging on to the vines for dear life as we skated/fell down the muddy path (created by our guide step by step). Exhilaratingly fun for the first two hours, absolutely miserable for the other 4. My knees and thighs are dead to this world. One thing I learned that I feel very strongly about- the descent should NEVER take longer then the hike up. Never. It goes against so many rules of nature....it's just not okay.