My brother, Pat, made a map of my travels so far, which was very nice of him. Click to see map. I´m in Antigua, in a fantastic hostel. Last night we had an all you can eat BBQ followed by lots of silly party games, like musical chairs. There are also some Dutch kayakers here that I met at the Big Boat Bananza in Wicklow two years ago! Small world eh! Antigua itself is a Colonial town surrounded by volcanoes. There is a picture postcard photo opportunity around every corner. It´s full of tourists and people taking Spanish classes, but it´s nice to be in a town that feels safe to walk around. It also experiences earthquakes, which have destroyed the town a few times in the past, leaving lots of ruined buildings. Walking around today, I stumbled into a parade. I don´t know what it was for, but it had a Christmas theme and lots of cartoon characters. Then, the best bit. I climbed an active volcanoe! Pacaya spews moltan lava from it´s crator every now and again, but most of the time, is just ozes lava from cracks on it´s sides. The views on the climb up of the surrounding volcanoes were stunning, heres one called Agua:

And being Central America with no such thing as public liability, you can get as close as you want to the 2000 degree lava! It was really brittle underfoot and if you fell, the cool lava was razor sharp!

I went up in the evening and caught the sunset. Then Pacaya looked amazing as the darkness highlighted all the activity. Beautiful. And it was hot, really hot. You cloud feel your skin turn pink if you got too close. I came home with a really fine layer of ash covering me.

Then of course we had to climb back down in the dark which was an interesting experience! Well, I slept well that night. So now I´m off to Lago De Atitlan in a few hours for some more natural beautiful.

Have you been keeping an eye on Simon´s progress?? http://kayakmadagascar.blogspot.com/ xxx R