Pacaya, Part Two: The Ascent

At about 4:30 in the afternoon, with approximately ninety minutes left until sunset, our little ansy group of international tourists, some woefully out of shape, began the gradual ascent of Pacaya. The trail was very easy to navigate, mostly smooth ash-blackened dirt hardened by the lack of recent rainfall and the feet of hordes of hikers climbing up day in and day out, whose mosaic of footprints packed down the soil. Our guide was a handsome, slightly sarcastic, wanting to flirt with the women but disguising it as doing chivalrous things, vaguely multilingual Antiguan who leads an average of ten trips to the summit and back per week (meaning that he was in superb physical shape and that this climb was literally a walk in the park for him). My dad walked really really fast, kind of like he was late for an appointment at the summit, and so he was able to stay up with the guide (until the guide fell back with the numerous stragglers huffing and puffing their way to the top). My mom kept a good pace, not too fast and not too slow. Grandma J decided to enlist a taxi-not the checkered kind with wheels, but the hairy maned, equine type. All along the sides of the trail, there were these four feet deep sinkholes, dug by park staff to trap excessive water during heavy rainstorms and therefore try to mitigate the effects of mudslides. As we climbed towards the summit, the faraway triangular forms of sister volcanoes punctuated the horizon, as well as the the concrete jungle of Guatemala City, thirty miles to the northeast, little buildings of all shapes and sizes dotting a broad valley floor as far as the eyes could see.