Mama´s On a Horse

So I´m going to back track a bit since I was so busy when my family was here. This morning I said goodbye to my parents and Gloria, which was sad considering for the rest of the trip I will be alone (except this weekend with Andrea). But I am very excited to start LEARNING some Spanish!

On Tuesday we climbed Volcan Pacaya. We decided to do the 6 AM tour since it usually rains in the afternoon. We drove for about an hour and a half to the base of the trail. They told us that the trail was about 4 kilometers long, with the first kilometer being the most difficult. And it was.

The trail was difficult because it was very steep and the altitude was very high, which makes you so much more exhausted. It hit my mom like a punch in the stomach about halfway up. Luckily, a little boy with a horse was behind the group yelling "taxi, taxi!" about every two minutes. Once my mom drifted towards the back of the group, he seemed like a vulture just waiting for her to go down.

So finally, my mom gets on the horse of shame (FYI we have been laughing about this whole experience every since it happened). She sat on it, following behind us, for the rest of the trip. She did not care because that was better than turning around. The funny part was when we got to a little resting place, they would go tie up the horse, and my mother, to a stake about twenty feet away from the group. So Lori is over there, sitting slumped on a horse, facing the opposite direction like she was being punished, while the rest of the group is chatting and whatnot. Poor Mama. We were laughing so hard about this later that evening! It was such a funny site, but at the time I didn´t take a picture.

She did, however, successfuly climp up the rest of the volcano, which was pretty amazing. First we reached this huge lava flow that was only three weeks old. We followed that to the volcano, which was still steaming and you could see bits of red lava in the rocks.

Gloria was such a trooper. When we first broke into the clearing where the volcano was, I saw these people on a very distant hill, very high up. I thought - we´re never going to make it up there! But we did. It was like climbing up part of the moon... only little spots of grass growing in the old lava rocks. It was amazing. I will post pictures next week. I´ve tried to add a picture to this blog that I found online of the volcano.

It was quite incredible... I´ve climbed a small part of Cotopaxi in Ecuador, but this was so cool to see the actual lava. In the distance, we could see two more volcanos, one of which had a small eruption when we were up there, and we could see the plume of smoke.

The environment here is a little different from west Michigan and Toronto!