Easter week and Pacaya Volcano

When I first planned my trip to Guatemala, I chose to travel in the month of April because it was the last free month I had available to do so before starting school. Little did I know that April is the best possible month to be in Antigua – not just for its ideal weather at this time of year (sunny and warm and just before rainy season starts), but because Antigua is the center of the biggest Easter celebration in the country. Unlike the one-day celebrations that go on in the States, Easter is celebrated over the course of several weeks, most notably by the collective creation of alfombras and organization of street parades. Beginning in April, Antiguans are out on the cobblestone streets early on Sunday mornings creating elaborately designed “carpets” (or alfombras) made from colored sawdust or assembled flowers, plants, fruits and vegetables. People spend hours painstakingly laboring over the impeccable details of these ornate carpets, ultimately creating beautiful masterpieces only for them to be destroyed in minutes when the parades of purple clad men and women carrying outrageously heavy platforms bearing statues of Biblical figures involved in the story of Christ’s crucifixion trample over them. It is an extraordinarily big affair – the drama of it all being reinforced with the sound of blaring horns and deep bass drums that reverberate through the streets at all hours of the day and night. With Catholicism being the overwhelmingly dominant religious affiliation in the region, floods of people from abroad and neighboring countries including El Salvador and Honduras join Guatemalans to pack the streets of Antigua to watch these processions making movement through the streets nearly impossible. It was truly neat that I was coincidentally able to be around at the peak of this culturally unique celebration!












I have not been able to be home (much less even in the same country) to celebrate Easter Sunday with family for the last 3 years. But I always try to do something fun the day of to make up for the longing from that absence. This year I decided to climb Pacaya Volcano, which is one of Guatemala’s active volcanoes that erupted last May. Compared to Acetanango, this volcano was much easier to climb, taking only about an hour and a half to get to the top. Because it’s an active volcano, the terrain was slightly different as well; the summit was bereft of verdant life and made me feel like I was on the moon with the fog of the clouds drifting over its crusty, hardened lava rocks. We found some vents that opened up into the earth and which were emitting such hot blasts of air that we were able to roast marshmallows in the heat, and when we placed sticks across the vents, they ignited in flames. There was also a cave that hollowed into the belly of the volcano whose rock walls were hot to the touch and whose temperature resembled that of a sauna. The fog on the volcano cleared out a bit just at sunset enough to see Pacaya’s ever-smoking crater, and we descended the volcano in the dark under the stars.