Food Feature: Toil and trouble

We had been warned. Our guidebook said the volcano Pacaya was one of the most dangerous places in Guatemala. A remote and unprotected tourist route, the trail was troubled with stories of robberies, beatings, rapes and murders, carried out with alarming regularity by “banditos” who live in the nearby mountains.
I was traveling Central America with my friend David Goode, who was spending the summer studying Spanish in the city of Antiqua. The two of us decided to take our chances. We left our valuables at the hotel and took a two-hour ride in a rickety van to the mountain.
We drove quite a bit up into the mountains to get to the trail head, and from there we hiked a good two hours before we got to the base of the volcano, which was nothing but a black cone that shot straight up about 800 feet. The path to the top didn’t snake around, either — it went straight up to the top.
We had an amiable group with us, but everyone began to lose their humor as we began the vertical climb. Each time you put your foot down, the shale would give out underneath, burying your shoes in tiny charcoal flakes. It was nature’s Stairmaster. Each step forward sent you back about three-and-a-half feet.
We trudged on about 45 minutes. People were literally dropping to their knees and crying, raising their hands to the sky, tears streaming down their faces.
As we got closer to the top, I turned to look back. Bodies were littered about like death on a battlefield. Beyond that were the trees and rocks we had passed earlier, and in the valley, beautiful little Guatemalan villages, 1,200 feet below.
The guide on this trip was a 60-year-old man who had done the hike every day for the last 45 years. His little dog hiked up with us, passing everyone, even though his legs were only 4 inches long. Whenever he’d go past us, David and I, who were on our knees and struggling in the shale, would say: “Keep going little dog! You can make it!”
The closer we got to the top, the colder it got. The wind whipped around us, and the smell of sulfur was choking. There was little we could see through the fog, and the steam hissed at us from cracks in the ground.
Reaching the top was somewhat anti-climactic. I had expected to look down like God on high to see the valley below, but we were deep in the thick of a cloud and could barely see a thing. Shapes of people would emerge from the haze and then disappear again. We couldn’t see the mouth of the volcano through the haze, either. Occasionally we’d hear a loud slurp and lava would come dropping down on the ground in front of us. But the spurts were infrequent and the lava output was minimal.
We sat on a ridge across from the mouth with a large group of hikers, had lunch and waited for the sporadic bursts. Each time the mountain burped, the entire group would cheer.
Hiking down was considerably easier. At first, we were careful not to fall, but then we noticed our guide was running ahead of us, so we followed suit, running as fast as we could, swishing back and forth like we were skiing, falling in the shale and laughing. At one point we kicked up a small avalanche that almost buried the little dog.
When we got to the bottom of the cone, we stopped to admire the view. The sun was setting, the sky pink and purple around the ominous black pillar. It was stunning. The sun was setting rapidly. We hiked the rest of the way down the mountain by flashlight, under an unbelievable canopy of stars.
At the trail head we drank Cokes and waited for our bus among begging children and other hikers, unaware that the real adventure of the night was still ahead.
There was another hiking group waiting. When their bus had to be pushed to get it running, we all laughed. But when they were gone, we realized we were the only ones left on the mountain, and our bus driver was under the hood of our vehicle trying to get it to run.
Once he got it running, we all piled in. As we drove, we were unsettled at the way he was gunning the engine. The engine would grind and grind and then he’d gun it and it would sound like it was about to die. We made jokes about it among ourselves, until we heard a loud crack like a shotgun.
We weren’t sure what it was or where it came from, but the bus driver looked visibly nervous. When the crack was followed by another blast, one of the girls in our group screamed. This blast sounded like it was near the front of the van and it definitely sounded like a gun.
The lights went out and we came to a complete stop. The inside of the van was deathly silent. We sat in the dark like sitting ducks on a deserted road, making nervous jokes among ourselves about having to find a place to sleep in the little village at the base of the mountain.
After about five minutes of fumbling, a van came driving up behind us. The headlights blared into the back window of the van where Dave and I were sitting with four Norwegian girls. “Ah, the banditos have come to rescue us,” we joked. We joked, but the situation didn’t seem right. We were all terrified.
We heard two car doors slam, and then two figures approached us slowly. One of the girls gasped when she saw that they were carrying machine guns.
They pulled open the van’s sliding door and looked in. One of them stood there looking us over. He asked something in Spanish, which none of us understood, while the other one went to the front of the van and spoke with the driver.
The man in the front went back to his van and turned off the lights. Now everything was silent. The only thing you could hear was footsteps moving around outside.
“Oh, my God. This is it,” I thought.
I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I saw the second “bandito” coming back to the van carrying ... a car battery! “What kind of sick torture do they have planned?” I thought to myself. He walked right past us to the front of the van where he popped the hood and slid the new battery in.
As we later found out, the guys weren’t banditos at all, but policemen who happened to drive up behind us after our car battery went out. The battery they gave us was not very powerful. We had to give our flashlights to the driver, who laid them all among the dashboard as headlights, and the van never went over 25 miles per hour. Our two-hour trip back home turned into a three-and-a-half-hour trip, but we didn’t mind. We were full of jokes — and happy to be alive.
brent.dey@creativeloafing.com