There are three volcanoes that watch over Antigua. There are certainly more looming in the distance but there are three watchmen. Agua, Fuego, and Acatenango. Why it didn’t get a cool elemental name, I don’t know.
Right now, Fuego is the one that’s active, and I don’t just mean that in the sense that it isn’t technically dormant. It spits smoke and lava out almost daily.
The hike itself is not insanely difficult. Yes, it’s steep and the ground in unsteady but the trek is made more difficult because of the altitude, (insert height). You carry a little more than you would for a day hike (food, extra water for cooking and warm clothing + blanket for the cold), but truthfully, I would have been willing to carry up more had I not been so cold at night.
To start the morning, I went to breakfast to score a smoothie and some pancakes, primetime hiking fuel. The bus picked me up at 8:30 and we went around grabbing a few people from other hostels before an hour-long drive out to the base of the mountain.
We gathered some gear for the trek and packed up and began the ride up. When we weren’t in the trees, the view was pretty nice of the towns around as we made our way up, however, the clouds obscured much of it.
There were a few stops on the way up, one of which was for lunch. In addition to the lunchbox they had packed, they were selling ramen, which I bought. Not a great idea, as the soup would be sloshing around in my stomach for the last half of the ascent.
When we reached the camp, we started a fire, which was needed anywhere out of the sunlight, which was dwindling quickly. We were made dinner by our guide and ate around the fire. The fog was rolling in but we had the joy of being joined for company by several explosions of the volcano, many of which scared us at their size. As darkness fell, the fog shrouded the caldera. However, we were still able to see a few splashes of lava. Luckily, time would be our friend and the fog would recede and let us get great views of the spewing lava that we had been hearing.
After enough watching, it was time for bed. We had a sleeping bag, blankets, and extra clothes, but I still was freezing. We weren’t even on the ground; we were on cots in a shared tent. Preparation was not one of the things that went well for me on this trek. It was honestly a pretty brutal night, especially since leaving the sleeping bag to go to the bathroom resulted in losing a lot of my stored up heat.
One redeeming, but really not comforting, in fact plunging me right back into the icebox, factor was that we woke up early (3 AM) to hike up to the summit. As I told you before, I was underprepared with warm clothes, so this was bad, since it got windier as we approached the unprotected top of the mountain above the clouds.