Today I feel like I swallowed a gallon of dust, my eyes and nose burn, my throat feels like I´ve sucked on way too many cigarettes, and I just long for a big clean mountaintop breath and a roll in soft green grass.

But then we tramp down to the parque calvario, the street is full of women in their colorful garb selling lilies and rue, daisies and ferny asparagus. We run our fingers through the asparagus and tell one of the women that our grandmother´s name is Rue. The traveling vendors have set up rows of wares for the upcoming lent celebration - you can get everything from pink colored popcorn to pizza and Guatemala´s version of a funnel cake. The festiva has rides too and as we weave through the web of them we´re certain that Guatemala not only has a direct connection to purchasing the U.S.´s used up schoolbuses, they also deal in ancient fair rides - one´s strung and teetering together in a way that would rouse the likes of those drawn to adventure sports and multiple injury lawyers.

So, today and yesterday we had school off and I can´t impress our need for Friday. Our brains resembled taffy and our sponge ablility was nada. On Saturday morning we pulled ourselves from slumber and walked in moonlight through the streets to meet up with 3 other students to climb Volcan Santa Maria. We rode in the back of an open pickup truck, freezing our rears and ears off and got dropped off at a small town at the base of the volcano. The temp was 5 degrees Celsius, you can do the math. The owners of the Spanish school, Nora and Rolanda led us up the mountainside in early morning twilight. As we climbed you could see down into the lights of Xela; low clouds hovered over the City and with each step we made our escape. No cars, no music, no exploding firecrackers or other gringos, just rocks and earth, trees, farms full of cabbages, onions, stick-woven walls, patches of lilies and foxglove (el corazon de Jesus) known for it´s natural ability to slow the heart down. And another tree called chichicastes that supposedly you can make a salve from to help with burns, and an orange invasive parastic vine, that we have in Carolina as well, that Guatemaltecos use to combat cancer. Up and up we went, with our motley crew being passed by Mayans on their pilgrimage to the summit. Their limbs and legs, deprived of 3 days of food or water, moved effortlessly and with certainty, leaving us in the dust.

The morning made for multiple moments of lost in translation. Since the school owners led the hike, most of the explanations and descriptions were in Spanish. Our first confusion came with the description of the Mayans and a simultaneous discussion about serpent bites. Seems Matthew thought they told us that if any of the women summitting the volcan failed to honor the fast, they´d be brought down off the mountain, have their hand cut off and immediately cauterized in a fire. It seems Rolando was talking more about the snake bite. This made for mucho belly rolling with our leaders.

The next surprise was that we learned that we weren´t hiking to the summit - instead we were walking a third of the way up volcan Santa Maria and around it to view active Volcan Santiaguito. How we learned, however, was when nora yelled, ´´Eruption,´ and we saw a huge billowing cloud rising over the la colina, hill. Now Matthew, inheriting his wanderlust for exploding volcanoes from his father, just nearly fainted and set his mind quickly to determining how long we had before our lungs began to singe, and firey mud, wind and trees came whirling at us. But, hey, no one else seemed to be nervous, and nora said it erupts about every 20 or 30 minutes, so we continued to plod towards the crater. Eventually, we stopped about a half mile from what looked like moonscape, and froze our asses off in the shadow of Santa Maria until her fiesty son gave a hell of a show -- rumbling sounds, steam and likely toxic sulfa and chlorine gas, flying towards the sky like what can one only describe as a mushroom clould like on tv or in your picture books. Needless to say, we were all in awe, and we watched it blow four more times before we scampered off. Somewhere out in the distance, Rolando said, was el mar, the sea, but for all the haze from buring trash and kitchen stoves we never saw it.