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volcanos

// February 18th, 2005 // Guatemala

Well, casey you had told me to try to get a picture of a smoking volcano… and i think you´ll be quite pleased… we finally hiked that volcano… they of course made us pay 50% more because we missed the correct time to go… they will get you everyway they can down here… so we got up at 530 am and took a bus for about 1.5 hours over some shitty roads… the first part of the climb was real simple… laughably simple. we were with maybe 20 other people or so… we got to the part right before the summit and the top was all clouded in, we couldn´t even see the top… we were disappointed… but, we climbed anyways… the top part was real hard to climb… it was all tiny volcanic rock and sharp… it was like climbing a big sand dune which sucks as well… plus i had on sandals… well what one would get if shoes and sandals were to have offspring. i had to stop and empty them out every so many feet… also to catch my breath…

we finally made it to the top and i could hear this sound that i can only explain by comparing it to the wave machine at noah´s ark… it was going woooosh wooooosh wooooosh… and then i realized it was eruptions… i didn´t really realize that the volcano would be shooting lava up… it was pretty crazy… we walked around the bend and there was this one little part that was shooting chunks of red hot lava up about 10 feet in the air… we were about 30 feet away or so. the day before, they said it was going crazy and i think the rocks were landing where we were standing… you could also see flowing lava off to the side as well… to top it off, the wind picked up a bit and blew the clouds off… so we could see three more volcanos off in the distance… the lower parts of them engulfed in clouds… so pretty. all in all i took about 300 photos filling two 512mb cards and having to empty one once and then filling it again… hopefully 3 or 4 of the photos turn out…. they will be very nice if they do… so that was my day yesterday… today i´m heading to the capital city to get a bus ticket back to costa rica… and then heading up north for about 3 days then the bus down to costa rica… going to be a long one tooo!!!

hope all is well!