Antigua & Acatanengo

🐧 update.

I will do two uploads, one for Antigua, one for the volcano hike! This post is photos of antigua.

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After Colombia, we flew into Guatemala City but didn't stay long, heading straight to Antigua. We heard it was safer, and our Uber driver confirmed that by warning us about the dangerous zones in the city. The drive took around two hours, so we arrived in Antigua quite late. Antigua felt very safe and charming, with a well-preserved historic atmosphere. Even fast food restaurants (like mcdonalds, Starbucks, Taco Bell) here are nicely designed to fit the city’s colonial style! Overall I really liked antigua, although there were parts of it I felt have been designed just for the tourists.

We stayed for four nights, spending time wandering the old town, which is small and easy to explore on foot. We went to some great spots for food and drinks. The city is good for walking and enjoying the vibrant Mayan culture/colonial style. Anothr plus for us was that the people in Guatemala speak Spanish slowly and clearly, so was a good place to practice and improve our Spanish.

After four nights, Jodie decided she wanted to head up to Lake Atitlan to go to a yoga retreat whereas I opted to stay in antigua to do the Acatanengo volcano hike. This is a 2 day tough hike which i did with a group of 20 people through a tour company. Day one was a 6 hour hike to basecamp which was difficult for two reasons. Firstly because it was very steep and our group was moving fairly quickly and secondly because I was carrying a 13.5kg bag the whole way up which was packed with layers for the cold (which the tour company offered for rent for free) along with 4 litres of water and lunch for the day. This made the climb much more difficult and my legs started to cramp quite badly towards the end of the day (later realised I hadn't adjusted my rented bag properly which probably was making it a lot worse). Some people in other groups didn't make it to basecamp but all of our group made it up!

After the basecamp hike, we were given the option to continue hiking to fuego which is the active volcano next to acatanengo. Fuego erupts around once every 20 minutes so it's a very rare experience to hike up an erupting volcano! Our whole group decided to do fuego which was the hardest part of the hike yet, super steep and very windy and cold as it was getting darker. It was very cloudy so visibility was limited, and there were also no trees for protection from the wind after a point so was tricky to keep walking and not fall over, the trekking poles helped alot here. After a point, our guide told us we couldn't go any further without it being dangerous, so we waited on a ridge for the clouds to clear so we could see the volcano erupting from up close. Sadly the clouds were persistent. We had to turn back after about an hour and a half of waiting in the freezing cold. The hike back to base camp was brutal, but once we got there we could see a super clear view of fuego erupting from basecamp which was amazing! We spent the night watching it erupting.

The next morning there was another optional sunrise summit hike to the top of acatanengo, but everyone in our group was so tired that only 5 of us managed to wake up at 3am for it! It was worth the rise as the views were amazing at the top although was very windy.

Finally after the sunrise summit, we started the long descent to the bottom. Sore on the knees but not as tiring as the way up!

Next 🐧 coming very soon, probably tomorrow! Stay frosty.Read more