Central America 2000 - We climb our first volcano
From Worldtraveller
Another grey day followed, but we didn't have the time to wait for sunshine so we decided to climb Volcán Pacaya. This is another spot notorious for armed robbery, and I may now be giving the impression that Guatemala is a gun-ridden nightmare country. Well, it's not the safest of holiday destinations, but if you want a holiday without any risk involved, Latin America generally is not the place to go. From Guatemala's independence in 1821, the government has generally been a dictatorship. The dictators have generally been military, and have ruled in the interests of the wealthy classes. Briefly, from 1944 to 1954, Guatemala had a democracy, and elected liberal leaders, but things were soon back to the usual order.
The first democratically elected leader, Juan José Arevalo, began a modest program of social reform. This was continued and accelerated by his successor, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, who also started a massive land reform program. Huge areas of land owned by the United Fruit Company but left fallow were to be nationalised and redistributed, and the UFC would be compensated at the value they had declared for tax purposes. This was a fraction of the true value, and the UFC was not happy. However, they had friends in high places in the American government, and in 1954, a US-backed coup forced Arbenz into exile, and the land reform out of the reckoning. The young Ernesto 'Che' Guevara was in Guatemala at the time, and later said that this was the moment he became a revolutionary.
The coup returned Guatemala to a military dictatorship, and over the next few years, laws were passed which made voting rights dependent on literacy, disenfranchising three-quarters of the population. The secret police became ever more powerful, and opposing the government became dangerous. In the early 1960's, guerrilla groups began to form, and by the middle of the decade the country was embroiled in civil war. This continued for the next thirty years, reaching a peak of brutality in the 1980s, when the government, believing that the indigenous people were all in league with the guerrillas, simply wiped out any village where they believed the guerrillas to be. In the 1990s, dialogue between the government and the rebels finally began, and in 1996, peace accords were signed, ending 36 years of war, during which 200,000 people had been killed.
The problem these days is that there are still an awful lot of guns in Guatemala, and many people live in great poverty. The pace of the change since the signing of the accords has been too slow for some, and as the number of foreign visitors rises, the incidence of crime has risen too. However, the danger is still small, and with simple precautions one can avoid trouble successfully. Though Volcán Pacaya has been well known in the past for its armed robberies, a daily tour with armed guards now takes people to the top, and no problems have been reported for some time.
We took the tour at 1pm, and after a dramatic two-hour drive to the base of the volcano, we set out along the trail for the top. It was not very hard going, and the weather was better than it had been. We had spectacular views of the volcanoes around Antigua and the surrounding countryside. After a couple of hours walking, we reached a shoulder about 200m below the summit. Unfortunately the weather was now closing in, and we were soon in thick cloud. After this point, the climb also becomes much more difficult. Pacaya's frequent eruptions mean that the upper slopes are a barren cone of loose rock, and climbing the last stretch is very much a case of two steps up, one step down. The wind was fearsome as well, making it an extremely arduous final push to the top.
We got there, though, only to find that we couldn't see more than three feet in front of us. Had we been able to see down into the crater, we would have seen lava flowing on the crater floor. All we got, though, was a fearsomely hot wind blowing out of the crater. I reached over the edge to pick up one of the sulphur-covered rocks, and I had to be quick to avoid burning my hand. All around the summit, there were steaming hot vents, and the whole area was warm to the touch. We stayed up there for about half an hour before returning to ground level.
The descent was a lot more fun than the climb, and we virtually ran down, creating landslides as we did so. This was the first summit we reached on the trip, and though the weather had let us down, we were still pleased to have made it. We decided we would try and climb Volcán Acatenango the next day.
