Longest Day of the Year

After nearly dying last week, I haven´t felt motivated to blog, but that doesn´t mean that I haven´t been busy.

Saturday was summer solstice and it was definitely the longest day of the year for me. I really wanted to volunteer to go on a reforestation hike on Volcano Tajumlco, the tallest volcano in Central America, but none of the other cool cats wanted to join me and so I signed up by myself with Quetzaltrekkers, www.quetzaltrekkers.com. I joined a larger group of 9 adults and 4 guides for the 2 day hike as well as 2 other guides and 15 8 year old street kids they support. I had the choice of just the one day hike or to do the overnight and go to the top of the volcano. I figured that I might as well go to the top.

Quetzaltrekkers had bought 4000 trees for us to plant on the volcano to combat the deforestation of the land. However, this is Guatemala, and plans change. I woke up at 3:30am, and we had intended to arrive 3 hours before we actually did, but the place to plant the trees ended up being on the other side of the volcano. We arrived around 11am. The locals, including the mayor, showed up to greet us and we listened to about 20 min of speeches by 5 different guys. Then off we went to plant, however, the locals decided to plant 3960 on their own and so we only had 40 left to plant. I planted mine with care. Then the locals treated us to lunch and beer and we finally left around 1pm.

Since none of the guides had ever been up this side of the volcano, a local guy joined us and off we went. We started our hike much lower than usual, but the guy assured us that we would only take 3 hours to get to base camp. The original plan was to have the 15 kids and 2 guides split off at some point, but that never happened since we had no idea where we were. Nevertheless, the kids impressed me greatly with their ability to hike the volcano while carrying backpacks the size of them. Several times during the 4.5 hour hike, I wanted to weigh them down with my 5 L of water since I was the slowest hiker on the trip. The kids often ran ahead of the guides and at one point we split up into two groups. At a fork in the road, several kids went up one road and several kids went up the other. The fog was so great, we couldn´t see very far in front of us. All the adults split up too and eventually met up farther up the road. Surprisingly, we didn´t lose any kids. They all seemed to be good at keeping track of each other.

The hike itself tortured me immensely. I´m not a great hiker to begin with, especially at that altitude, and even very experienced hikers on the trip mentioned that the hike hurt them; all our equipment and water weighed us down tremendously. I never complained though and just tried to think like the little red engine again. At one point, I had to get down on all fours and crawl up the volcano because it was so steep. Then, the rain came. I put on my poncho, but the wind kept blowing the rain onto the side of my pants. I became drenched in no time. Then the wind came. The wind blew so hard the sound reminded me of crashing waves in the ocean. After 4.5 hours, Lizzy a guide, and I spotted an abandoned cow barn. All the others had passed it up in search of base camp. Lizzy, thankfully, ran ahead to convince the group to camp there for the night. We all were tired, hungry, wet and ready for a break and so the sell job wasn´t difficult. We covered the floors with tarp and the open side walls with tarp as well as put tarp on the inside beams in case it rained during the night. We had created our own base camp. A few people slept in 2 man tents and the rest us slept on the floor since the 6 man tents were too tall to put up in the barns. The guides eventually made pasta and I hit the hay, literally, around 9pm.

I slept in every piece of clothing I had borrowed for the trek and yet I still nearly froze. My nose really wanted a face mask We woke up at 5am the next day to see the sunrise. Breakfast took longer than usual and we hiked again around 8am. Unfortunately, due to the late start, we still never made it to base camp, but the hike today of rolling hills made me feel so alive unlike yesterday´s hike when I didn´t have much time or energy to enjoy the scenery. Oh well.... I really just wanted to plant trees, well one tree, and go for a nice hike. I accomplished both in the end and survived yet another day in Guatemala.