I went to see the lava at one of the local volcanoes!
It cost me all of twelve dollars to drive for about an hour out of town and half an hour up into the hills to a small village. The only interesting thing about this leg of the journey is that the shuttle bus driver had a very visible 9mm pistol holstered on his hip and that the clasp to hold the gun in and keep the hammer down was always unclasped and the safety was not engaged! - I assume there is good reason for this as it seemed to be the standard practice on each of the tour bus drivers that I saw...
Anyway, from the village you hike up the jungle hills for about an hour (accompanied by guys on horses waiting for the weak ones to flag so they can sell them a horse ride to the top), whence you crest a rise and can see the volcano ash cone. The main cone is quiet but a smaller side cone has several areas of glowing rocks and if you watch for a few minutes you see the edge of the slow flowing lava break away and bright red rocks go tumbling down to the base of the cone.
So then of course we hiked up onto the old lava field and over to the base of the cone where the rocks tended to stop :)
Hiking on the lava flow was quite interesting. The guide indicated that the stuff we were hiking on had been there for about four months. It was very light rock (not pumice but similar) and mostly very dark grey or black (indicates that it is cold). It was also incredibly sharp as well as being mostly hollow (the surface hardens and the lava flows out from under the crust - forms lava tubes). This meant that there was some danger of breaking through in various places if you were unlucky. The consequences of this would have been very nasty cuts and scratches on the leg (No risk of falling into a pool of molten lava!). However, there were some places where the rock became a lighter grey and there was a very definite sense of heat coming off them (along with the visual heat shimmer) and I chose note to walk on these areas! I went ahead in some places (as I am want to do) and I must admit that I got a bit worried there trying to find a good route with the alternate hot and cold wafts of the wind and the hollow sounding jagged rocks that were a lighter grey than I wanted them to be :) There were a couple of places where you could peer down into cracks and see the glowing red rock about 50cm below the surface!
Well, we all survived the approach and settled in at the base of the small cone to watch as the slow lava flow at the top of the cone pushed forward and the edge of the flow collapsed sending a cascade of small glowing boulders down the hill... directly towards us :) Occasionally there would be a bigger one (the size of a person) but in general it was all quite safe.
This of course was not enough for the young males in the group and the antics started. These included running up to the nearest red boulder and lighting ones cigarette or just posing next to it for a photo while the crowd kept lookout, for the next red boulder on its way down the hill toward the young warrior, and gave timely warning of impending danger ... or not!... depending on how we felt about the individual :)
Then the sun went down and the rocks seemed redder (as was the sunset) and then we hiked back down the mountain in the dark (again haunted by men on horses waiting to prey on the weak ones).
So I got to see red rocks and it was very good. It was however not the flowing red lava that I have on my list of amazing things to see this life time. So I guess I´ll have to go back another day when the mountain is more active... perhaps on my return journey to the north :)
