Acatenango Saga (Part 2)
(continued from Part 1 - more photos added)
Meanwhile, David and Ricardo had been preparing lunch. There was a small thatched hut on our campsite, and I arrived just in time to fix myself a hoagie, Guatemala style. Deli ham, cheese, lots of tomatoes and onions and peppers, guacamole, frijoles and hot sauce. We ate standing up because the ground was covered in mud and wet grass. As we ate, the skies started to open more and the soft drizzle turned into an actual rain. Suddenly everyone was assembling their tents. Lexie and I were terrible tent assemblers, and David and Ricardo ended up doing it for us. It almost didn’t matter who put up the tents though, since they were so old and leaky nearly everyone had some problems with water. So, tents up, food eaten, mountain almost summitted, now, what to do.
Our group of volcano climbers was not the only group to try the Acatenango summit that day. We had already been passed by the group of children and their blankets, and soon after we all reached the base camp, a small group of three Spaniards broke out of the mist. They rested for a moment and then continued on up the face. Ricardo said there was a third group that was already on the crater, and so they decided that we should camp at the base for the night and do a sunrise summit. We would leave at 3:45am and hike the final 3 hours in darkness without our packs, thank god. I was fine with that decision, even though it meant a long rainy afternoon in a mud hut.
By 3:00, everyone was bored. We were all crammed into the hut, huddled into one corner because the other half was 5 inches of mud. Ricardo was making a fire and had decided to use plastic bags to get it lit and then burn some moss to dry out some of the logs. The result was a lot of toxic smoke. I abandoned the hut for the rain outside, and Lexie and I decided to check on the status of our leaks. The tents were probably about five years old, and a lot of their rain repellent had worn off. I knew this could be fixed fairly easily, but as all things here, nothing really gets fixed until it is totally useless. So, leaky tents remained. However, Old Town should have known better than to pack tents without ground covers. We set up our tents straight onto the wet grass (in our case, mud), and I was unsurprised when everything inside immediately began to get damp. Lexie and I spent the next hour waterproofing our packs and our ceiling, using mostly these ubiquitous plastic bags that are all over the place here. You know, the ones that have been outlawed in San Francisco.
Once our tent was nice and cozy, we rejoined the hut group. There was a large wooden plank that was big enough to fit four scrunched people and some food stuff, so mostly we just hung about and chatted. Cards would have been nice, or some Trivia Pursuit, but as it was, we all just had to get to know each other. There was a lot of story telling. Still, that only goes so far before people start to have crazy ideas. I decided it might not be such a bad idea to do a small second hike just up the side of the mountain that we could see. Eddie and Lexie were thinking the same thing, but first E wanted to climb the hunting blind that was in one of the trees. I’m not sure if this was a real blind, or just some logs nailed to the side of a tree that culminated in a boxish treehouse about 100 feet up, but whatever the case, Eddie started to climb. He wasn’t too far off the ground before realizing that maybe this wasn’t a good idea. The tree was on the edge of the mountain (and when I say “edge,” it is not hyperbole. The decline began immediately) and the logsteps were about 5 feet apart. One was shaky. He climbed a fair ways before abandoning the idea of the blind. We continued on to our “small hike,” but again, about 10 yards in and up (again, not exaggerating), everyone realized that this was stupid. We abandoned the hike and went back to the hut. I cannot imagine what it was like to be a frontiersman, or whatever, with all the smoke and downtime.
Finally it was dinnertime. David and Ricardo had again prepared some food, this time couscous and sauteed vegetables. I ate one plate full, had a cup of orange spice tea, and then exhaustion hit. My plate was barely washed before I needed to sleep. Lexie and I decided to do one last bathroom run (this time complete with childhood songs and christmas carols) down the scary foggy hill and then retired to our suite. Thankfully the plastic bags we had stuck in the ceiling had caught all of the rain water and it was no longer leaking on our mats. Also, E has given up Will’s inflatable pillow to Lexie, and so I got to share half of the bounty. Lex and I were the perfect team. Equal parts annoyed with the rain, but willing to joke about it and put up with the inconvenience. Everything was funny, everything was something to be conquered. Even getting ready for bed was a chore, and we worked in tandem, a bag for the muddy shoes here, a raincoat draped there. Finally about 8:30 I think we were both tucked in nicely and ready for sleep. That’s when reality hit.
I’m not sure if it was the altitude, or the hike, or my old friend insomnia, or even that single cup of caffeinated orange spice tea, but whatever the case, I lay there in the dark, in that tent, on the side of that volcano, for close to an hour, listening to the howling wind and my howling heart. Sleep just would not come. My heart hammered like it was running a sprint, and I waited for it to calm down. I willed it to calm down. It just hammered harder. It started to outhammer the thunder, and it was already outpacing the rain. I lay there in the dark, thinking dark thoughts. Finally I drifted off. I don’t know when, but it was long enough to dream that we were floating away, because I woke again wondering if the night would ever end.
The rain was coming down harder now. Right before we had gone to sleep, Eddie mentioned that he’d received a text from Will saying, “I really hope you guys aren’t still on that mountain.” And that was it. No word about whether the world was ending again, so my imagination was free to run. And run she did. I was thinking of every possible disaster scenario and how to escape it. I envisioned a landslide of broken trees and mud and water and wondered if I’d have time to grab my camera. I gave up my ipod to the illusion since it had stopped working in the high altitude. I decided that if it came to it, I’d have to grab Lex and shout for E and then run up the side of that tree blind. About this time in my disaster preparations, I hear Lexie go, “are you awake?” It was 11:30.
Turns out that she was also worried about the water we heard raging all around us, so in order to keep from being too anxious, we started talking. Lex thanked Will out loud for the use of his pillow, then we went through all the different things that maybe he had done that evening. She tried to remember the phone number of the VIP she knew who had a helicopter he could send for us, and then we spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to get hold of a phone without getting out of the tent. At a strange moment, we both thought that the volcano was erupting, but that it was blowing up in a rhythmic reggaeton beat. Turns out we were just hearing the bass echoing up from a party in San Miguel Dueñas about three thousand feet below.
The evening continued in much the same way. As Alicia said the next morning, “oh, yeah, I slept. 45 minutes here, 45 minutes there.” At 3:45am I heard David “knock” on our tent. He said that we weren’t going to do the sunrise climb because the rain had made everything too dangerous and slippery. In some weird sleep coma, I answered in a chipper, “qué surpresa” and woke again at 6am, unsure of what that night had been all about. It was like I had survived something big.
Meanwhile, David and Ricardo had been preparing lunch. There was a small thatched hut on our campsite, and I arrived just in time to fix myself a hoagie, Guatemala style. Deli ham, cheese, lots of tomatoes and onions and peppers, guacamole, frijoles and hot sauce. We ate standing up because the ground was covered in mud and wet grass. As we ate, the skies started to open more and the soft drizzle turned into an actual rain. Suddenly everyone was assembling their tents. Lexie and I were terrible tent assemblers, and David and Ricardo ended up doing it for us. It almost didn’t matter who put up the tents though, since they were so old and leaky nearly everyone had some problems with water. So, tents up, food eaten, mountain almost summitted, now, what to do.
Our group of volcano climbers was not the only group to try the Acatenango summit that day. We had already been passed by the group of children and their blankets, and soon after we all reached the base camp, a small group of three Spaniards broke out of the mist. They rested for a moment and then continued on up the face. Ricardo said there was a third group that was already on the crater, and so they decided that we should camp at the base for the night and do a sunrise summit. We would leave at 3:45am and hike the final 3 hours in darkness without our packs, thank god. I was fine with that decision, even though it meant a long rainy afternoon in a mud hut.
By 3:00, everyone was bored. We were all crammed into the hut, huddled into one corner because the other half was 5 inches of mud. Ricardo was making a fire and had decided to use plastic bags to get it lit and then burn some moss to dry out some of the logs. The result was a lot of toxic smoke. I abandoned the hut for the rain outside, and Lexie and I decided to check on the status of our leaks. The tents were probably about five years old, and a lot of their rain repellent had worn off. I knew this could be fixed fairly easily, but as all things here, nothing really gets fixed until it is totally useless. So, leaky tents remained. However, Old Town should have known better than to pack tents without ground covers. We set up our tents straight onto the wet grass (in our case, mud), and I was unsurprised when everything inside immediately began to get damp. Lexie and I spent the next hour waterproofing our packs and our ceiling, using mostly these ubiquitous plastic bags that are all over the place here. You know, the ones that have been outlawed in San Francisco.
Once our tent was nice and cozy, we rejoined the hut group. There was a large wooden plank that was big enough to fit four scrunched people and some food stuff, so mostly we just hung about and chatted. Cards would have been nice, or some Trivia Pursuit, but as it was, we all just had to get to know each other. There was a lot of story telling. Still, that only goes so far before people start to have crazy ideas. I decided it might not be such a bad idea to do a small second hike just up the side of the mountain that we could see. Eddie and Lexie were thinking the same thing, but first E wanted to climb the hunting blind that was in one of the trees. I’m not sure if this was a real blind, or just some logs nailed to the side of a tree that culminated in a boxish treehouse about 100 feet up, but whatever the case, Eddie started to climb. He wasn’t too far off the ground before realizing that maybe this wasn’t a good idea. The tree was on the edge of the mountain (and when I say “edge,” it is not hyperbole. The decline began immediately) and the logsteps were about 5 feet apart. One was shaky. He climbed a fair ways before abandoning the idea of the blind. We continued on to our “small hike,” but again, about 10 yards in and up (again, not exaggerating), everyone realized that this was stupid. We abandoned the hike and went back to the hut. I cannot imagine what it was like to be a frontiersman, or whatever, with all the smoke and downtime.
Finally it was dinnertime. David and Ricardo had again prepared some food, this time couscous and sauteed vegetables. I ate one plate full, had a cup of orange spice tea, and then exhaustion hit. My plate was barely washed before I needed to sleep. Lexie and I decided to do one last bathroom run (this time complete with childhood songs and christmas carols) down the scary foggy hill and then retired to our suite. Thankfully the plastic bags we had stuck in the ceiling had caught all of the rain water and it was no longer leaking on our mats. Also, E has given up Will’s inflatable pillow to Lexie, and so I got to share half of the bounty. Lex and I were the perfect team. Equal parts annoyed with the rain, but willing to joke about it and put up with the inconvenience. Everything was funny, everything was something to be conquered. Even getting ready for bed was a chore, and we worked in tandem, a bag for the muddy shoes here, a raincoat draped there. Finally about 8:30 I think we were both tucked in nicely and ready for sleep. That’s when reality hit.
I’m not sure if it was the altitude, or the hike, or my old friend insomnia, or even that single cup of caffeinated orange spice tea, but whatever the case, I lay there in the dark, in that tent, on the side of that volcano, for close to an hour, listening to the howling wind and my howling heart. Sleep just would not come. My heart hammered like it was running a sprint, and I waited for it to calm down. I willed it to calm down. It just hammered harder. It started to outhammer the thunder, and it was already outpacing the rain. I lay there in the dark, thinking dark thoughts. Finally I drifted off. I don’t know when, but it was long enough to dream that we were floating away, because I woke again wondering if the night would ever end.
The rain was coming down harder now. Right before we had gone to sleep, Eddie mentioned that he’d received a text from Will saying, “I really hope you guys aren’t still on that mountain.” And that was it. No word about whether the world was ending again, so my imagination was free to run. And run she did. I was thinking of every possible disaster scenario and how to escape it. I envisioned a landslide of broken trees and mud and water and wondered if I’d have time to grab my camera. I gave up my ipod to the illusion since it had stopped working in the high altitude. I decided that if it came to it, I’d have to grab Lex and shout for E and then run up the side of that tree blind. About this time in my disaster preparations, I hear Lexie go, “are you awake?” It was 11:30.
Turns out that she was also worried about the water we heard raging all around us, so in order to keep from being too anxious, we started talking. Lex thanked Will out loud for the use of his pillow, then we went through all the different things that maybe he had done that evening. She tried to remember the phone number of the VIP she knew who had a helicopter he could send for us, and then we spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to get hold of a phone without getting out of the tent. At a strange moment, we both thought that the volcano was erupting, but that it was blowing up in a rhythmic reggaeton beat. Turns out we were just hearing the bass echoing up from a party in San Miguel Dueñas about three thousand feet below.
The evening continued in much the same way. As Alicia said the next morning, “oh, yeah, I slept. 45 minutes here, 45 minutes there.” At 3:45am I heard David “knock” on our tent. He said that we weren’t going to do the sunrise climb because the rain had made everything too dangerous and slippery. In some weird sleep coma, I answered in a chipper, “qué surpresa” and woke again at 6am, unsure of what that night had been all about. It was like I had survived something big.
Estoy tan orgullosa de sus aventuras!
ReplyDeleteGracias a Dios! todos estan bien.
Mom
I loved these posts! Happy you made it down safe and that you're now in Rio cooking up more adventures.
ReplyDelete