Mumbacho - A Volcano Adventure

When you find yourself in Nicaragua with a free weekend, I can think of no better way to spend it then hiking a volcano. Three of the other SALTers and I left Managua early one morning. After two buses, one market, and a bag of fried banana chips, and a moto taxi that looked something like this:

We found ourselves waiting about half way up the volcano. We had just missed a shuttle bus that had taken a group of people up and the next one wasn't expected for another 45 minutes. Luckly, a truck drove by, and after the natural reserve workers flagged it down, we hopped in the flat bed. We shared our ride with two men, one older, the other our age. Both carried large guns, probably loaded. They worked for local coffee plantations, protecting against animals and people who liked to help themselves to the coffee crop.

After a steep twenty minute ride, we reached something like a base camp where we directed to a converted army jeep filled with people which would take us the rest of the way us. Like most Nica transportation, it was crowded, full of people from all over the world - Nicaraguans, Germans, and New Yorkers.

Once we reached the top, we were free to wander as we wanted - just so long as we made it back in time for the bus down. Mumbacho is an active volcano, but its last eruption was in 1570. Nevertheless, there were places where you could see the smoke and sulfur creeping out of the earth.

Mumbacho over looks the city of Granada and Lake Nicaragua. At one of the best look-outs, we pulled out our packed lunch of cold spaghetti, bananas, and cheese and crackers. I'm fairly certain the other hikers that wandered past us were jealous of our meal. 

The volcano has countless plant species that are native only to that region, many of them different type of orchids. I love being able to see bright flowers in the middle of winter. Even though the temperatures have been colder, a low of 68 is a far cry from what I'm used to.

On our way back down the volcano, I sat to an ENT doctor from Germany. He told me about what life was when he was growing up. How his uncle crashed in a German plane some where in France during war. How, when he wanted to visit his grandmother, he had to cross four boarders, all within his own city. How before his cousin passed away, he gave him a piece of the wall that he had taken when it finally fell. I listened him as the jungled passed beside me and thought about the two paths that had brought us both to this conversation and how different we were. Inspite of that, we were both there, enjoying the same thing and sharing a bit of who were were for a moment.