Nicaragua Day 9: burned at (not by) a sulphur-spewing volcano

Hi Loopy, thanks for your comment!

Earlier in the week (Thursday, to be precise) I was gleeful that you were a bit disoriented by my absence, but now you sound genuinely distressed, and I'm sad that you are feeling weird, it doesn't sound pleasant at all. I'm glad you had a good talk and that you ran into P yesterday and had yummy frozen yogurt.

All this goes to show that people can know each other really well and still have stereotypes and mistaken preconceptions... I think we both thought of me as the person who is sad and lonely when you go away, and of you, as the person who is competent and capable and actually even a little better off when I'm not around. So I guess maybe we're more the same than we thought! :-)

Well, something you said yesterday jolted me out of my homesickness and reminded me that my life at home has been difficult lately. I had forgotten all about everything—my difficulties with my schoolwork, our little italian friend, everything that was hard in recent months. But when I started to remember exactly what I would be going back to—especially finishing up school and slogging through the job search—it helped inspire me to really enjoy the heck out of these last two days of real vacation. I still can't wait to see you, but overall my mood and attitude when I got up this morning had much improved since last night when I felt all lonely and bereft. :-)

So, most of the group left very early this morning; I had breakfast with Mary Ann and Michael before they left for their plane. It was pleasant and mellow and we had a chance to talk about other topics than the ones that have preoccupied us all week. Then I said goodbye and went to get in the shower.

(The high school missionaries outside the window on the front terrace were being really loud and teenagery, and it was annoying me, but now they've started praying and that's even more annoying).

After that, I asked Doña Marta, the hotel owner (who staffs the front desk in the morning) (it's a small little hotel, more like a guest house, very pleasant) to call a taxi to take me to Masaya Volcano National Park. (I talked with our translator, Ann, before she left, to get some recommendations on fun stuff to do today and tomorrow; she suggested this and said it would be $25 for the ride out and back).

(Now the missionaries are having a theological discussion, argh; the youth minister is trying to explain predestination).

Well, Doña Marta told me it would be $40 instead of $25, so I wavered a bit and then decided to accept the price and just really get my $40 worth out of the day. So I did! It was great! I didn't feel bad about asking him to stop in different places or wait for me or anything, I just really enjoyed everything to the fullest.

And there was so much to enjoy! The good thing about not bringing a guidebook is that you can be surprised. Sometimes that's good, sometimes it's not so good; today it was all good.

So Don Manuel picked me up at eleven and we drove out of town to the south, on the road toward Masaya and Granada, which by now is getting quite familiar to me. After 20 minutes or so we were travelling along next to a massive field of lava, which is what first attracted my attention & curiosity last Sunday.

Instead of continuing on as before, we turned off the main road and started driving through the lava field. Don Manuel explained that the last major eruption was in 1772, and all this lava is from that time.

The rocks are still bare in many places, vegetated in some spots, and in a few places groups of larger trees have managed to grow, although the ground under them is still just piles of rocks. The whole area is impossible to use for planting or pasturage (the jagged jumbled rocks would be very difficult for animals to walk on without eventually injuring themselves), and therefore has remained mostly untouched--it was Nicaragua's first national park. The whole landscape was really quite impressive.

I stopped for a few photos of the Sacuanjote tree, Nicaragua's national flower, near a massive boulder (the size of a five- or six-story apartment building) that was spat out of the volcano and landed a kilometer (half-mile) away!

The lava rocks were so weird underfoot--they're lightweight (because they're full of air) and make weird squeaky crunching noises when you walk on them, and their bubbly poky shapes are intriguing.

Got back in the car and drove on up the side of the volcano to the crater at the top. The view out across the countryside during this drive was beautiful. The light was gorgeous, with huge fluffy clouds moving across a bright blue sky; as we got higher up the mountainside there was a refreshing breeze that made the air quite comfortable. (It's not actually terribly hot here, just extremely humid, so a bit of a breeze does wonders).

Higher up toward the crater the vegetation gets sparser, and the lava boulders give way to finer dirt and dust (perhaps ash) covered with tall gray-green grass. After a while I noticed that a few of the larger bushes existed up here too, but they seemed dead, their leaves withered and yellow; there was one big tree, but it was dead too, barkless and ghostly white. Don Manuel explained that when it rains, the gas from the crater turns the rain into sulfuric acid; I presume that this is the explanation for the desolation. Yet, later on my walk I would have a chance to see new shoots on these determined plants.

(I just heard the word "postmodern" from outside the window... I don't want to know).

We reached the rim of the crater and I was surprised and astonished (see above under "no guidebook") to see how deep it is. I think I've seen volcanic craters before but they were always flat across the bottom.

In this one, there is a flat surface like a floor, but it has a huge hole in it, and within that, a small hole at the bottom; yellowish clouds of sulphuric smoke continually billow out of the small hole. (I was lucky that the wind was blowing away from us--when the smoke occasionally blew toward me, it was chokingly acrid).

Until a few years ago, you could actually see lava in that small hole, but a landslide changed the terrain and now it just looks dark...but it is still open to the lava below.

Most impressive of all, you can hear the low rumbling sound of the continually roiling and bubbling lava! The sound isn't constant; sometimes there is a swishyness overlaid with the rumble, and sometimes there are muffled booms which I suppose must be pieces of rock falling in, though I really can't imagine.

Here, check out a picture! I was just in awe of this place!

When my parents took me to Hawaii when I was a little kid, I was so disappointed that the volcanoes didn't look like I had imagined. But this one does! It's a big cone, with a hole on the top, and lava in the hole!

Apparently when the Spaniards first got here in the sixteenth century, it was a much bigger hole, a huge open lake of lava 1 km across! The glow from the lava illuminated the billowing smoke with a fiery glow, and some stupid priest thought that it was literally the entrance to hell and stuck a cross on the rim to keep the devil inside....the cross today (a replica of the original, which must have been swept away in 1772 if not before) doesn't look like it could hold anything back; it just looks a bit small and pathetic, dwarfed by the enormity of all the natural phenomena around it.

Anyway, after staring in awe at this crater and filling up all my remaining camera memory with photos of it, I asked about a trail that seemed to go up a hundred yards to another vantage point over the crater. I received assurance that the whole area is patrolled by park rangers and that I would be quite safe wandering about alone. I found Don Manuel's commentary very interesting but I was tired of struggling along in Spanish and just wanted to wander a bit.

(Re the Spanish, my vocabulary for things having to do with the topics of the week is vastly expanded--I have vocabulary for the upcoming elections, rural women's empowerment, farming and land rights and reproductive health, etc.....but....I can't get the verb tenses right and all the little prepositions and adverbs and connecting words like "still" and "before" and "all" keep coming out in Japanese--I actually said "arigato" and "hai" at least once today, and I keep saying "sohhh, sohhh," when I want to say, "yes, you're right.")

So I went up to the little lookout and discovered that the path kept going beyond it, so I followed it up a hill and around a bend until I came to... (trumpet fanfare please) ANOTHER CRATER! (Remember what I said above about being surprised?)

It was immediately clear that this one has erupted much less recently: while there are barren sweeps of jumbled rock (as the sides are slowly tumbling down), there are also sweeps of vegetation and, far far down, the floor is filled with a little piece of lush rainforst, a small and more-or-less-circular area of immensely tall trees nestled together like a shining jewel in the palm of a hand, or a water droplet sparkling in a concave leaf. That may be the first piece of Nicaragua I've seen that was never deforested.

I saw that there was a very high place on the rim where I thought I might be able to get a photo of both craters simultaneously, so I set out towards it. But the path up to it was blocked with a "no pase" sign that warned of high winds and loose scree. I had seen people up there earlier, so I stayed on the same path around the side, hoping to find another way up there.

The path continued round the side of the second crater until I came upon.... (trumpet fanfare again if you don't mind) A THIRD CRATER!!!

This one was even older--much shallower, and with gentler slopes down (I'm guessing the sides had fallen in almost completely), although the space at the bottom is not much bigger. The slopes are grassy, and again at the bottom is a little piece of rainforest.

I just felt like the day couldn't possibly get any better, like wonders were heaped upon wonders.

I had clearly passed any point where I would be able to climb up to the high spot, but I wanted to see what else I would find, so I kept walking. Around on the back, here, I could see Lake Masaya, Lake Managua, and in the distance, the volcanoes we saw on Day Three when we drove to León.

It was SO BEAUTIFUL, with gorgeous forest stretching around the base of the volcanoes (I'm now on the opposite side from the more recent lava flows, and while this forest was all cut, it has been a national park long enough that it is growing back) and all the lakes, and the huge fluffy clouds and the blue blue sky. One of those views I'm going to file away in my "favorite memories" box.

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.... sorry this entry is so long but my traveling companions are all gone and there's no roommate to disturb, so I'm just writing and writing!

I'll try to speed this up a little, though, as if I were in an internet cafe and had to go home with my companions or had the five-minute warning flashing on my screen.

So then the path started to go downhill, and the sun was hot and the breeze stopped as I got lower, so I decided to turn around and head back. When I came to one of the park rangers (whom I'd passed earlier), I stopped and chatted with him briefly, and then asked if there was any place where I could see all the craters at once. He said yes, but I could only go if he guided me.

We proceeded up a steep but not difficult piece of rock (almost like a stairway) right up to the high spot I had hoped to reach earlier!

From there I could see the three craters I've already mentioned, and learned that their names were (in the order I encountered them) Santiago, San Fernando, and San Juan.

The guide then pointed out two more, beyond the active crater: San Pedro is farthest away (it was almost out of view from our vantage point), and Nindirí is an older crater that was actually higher, before Santiago and San Pedro opened up on its sides. So, Nindirí's floor now forms a flat plateau between San Pedro and Santiago, and is slowly being eaten away by Santiago.

You can actually see this really well in this image (the one labeled Masaya in the image is what the guides called San Fernando).

THEN... this is the coolest part... I asked what was the ridge beyond all the craters, and the guide explained that these five craters are all in the middle of what used to be a gigantic caldera, around the time of the dinosaurs. I

think (from reading around a bit online) that this means that there was a huge eruption or a series of them and then the whole thing collapsed in on itself. Either that it means that the whole thing was a roiling mass of lava.

Anyway, check out the topographical map to see the large oval caldera encircling the cluster of volcanoes at the center...Lake Masaya fills the southeastern end of the caldera.

Did I mention that this was all extremely cool?

Did I mention that I am a HUGE GEEK???? :-)

So anyway I returned to the car, and just as we were getting ready to leave, three hot and exhausted-looking backpacker types approached and asked for a ride down. It was a French man with an Argentine woman and British woman, and we all had a nice chat about how stupid and evil the Cuba embargo is, and all of Bush's policies in general, and ended on the theme of Margaret Thatcher. They left us at the visitors' center (I mean, we went in and they left).

Oh, I forgot to mention--one of the first things I saw when I arrived was four bright-colored birds flying up to and disappearing into the wall of the crater. In the visitors' center I learned that these birds, a largish green species of parakeet, have adapted to the toxic fumes of the volcano and are well-protected from predators in the walls of the craters.

The visitors' center was actually really fantastic and I learned a lot, but it is getting exremely late and people are going to think I'm weird because I've been here for like three hours.

I came back to the hotel, had a nap, and returned to one of my favorite spots for dinner: La Cocina de Doña Haydée. I had the same thing as last time, that lovely "Indio Viejo," a mix of deliciously flavored cornmeal and beef, and then had a dessert that Don Manuel had recommended, Buñuelos, which is fried yuca in honey. The dessert was a bit bitter for my taste but it was a wonderful meal. I enjoyed the tropical plants and flowers and breezes, and watched the clouds change color as the sun set.

Yup, I enjoyed the heck out of my day.

(even if I did get a bad sunburn and have to go to the grocery store on the way back to the hotel, to get some Jergens aloe lotion. :-) hence the title of the post)