Thursday, July 28: Volcán Masaya

We were kind of thinking that Mombacho would be the highlight of our trip, since the cloud forest was so amazing, but Volcán Masaya was really a showstopper.

The views from the visitor center were truly panoramic…

But the volcano itself was just amazingly deep and colorful: not quite as bright as the Grand Canyon, but subtly varied and impossibly deep.

The original volcán was immense: the national park defined by its boundaries stretches for 54 square miles. In its current form, it includes two distinct volcanoes—Nindiri and Masaya—and each of these has more than one crater. The most explicitly “active” volcano is Santiago, one of the three craters on Nindiri. We started there, climbing up to the cross (replacing the one) set up by the first Spaniards to encounter the volcano, which they took to be the gates of hell. Somoza is supposed to have had the National Guard throw his opponents into the volcano from helicopters, partly confirming the association, if you ask me.

Then we went over to the smaller Masaya volcano and climbed past one crater: it was smaller than Santiago, and the last eruption was in the eighteenth century, but geologists say it may be more likely to erupt than Santiago, since Santiago is constantly venting gases, so heat and pressure don’t have a chance to build up.

At the top of the ridge, the views in all directions were just amazing.

Then we came down from the ridge and drove down to a hut where they gave us hard hats and flashlights, and we went to investigate the caves. We walked some 180 meters into one cave, down to the place where indigenous people made offerings to the deity they imagined inhabiting the volcanoes. We switched off the lights and stood for 15 seconds in silence, and it was pretty eerie. It would have taken guts to go make offerings there when the volcano was active. Still, a chilamate tree has sent roots all the way down through the tunnel: omens of life’s insistent persistence.

The second cave we visited was much smaller, and we went just to see the bats swirling around the entrance. Our friend Chris got a great shot of the bats, and also recorded this sound video of their wings buffeting the air. Jeremy was very proud of how well he did with the cave walk and the bats.

Finally, we went to a lookout that’s in the process of slowly collapsing, so they don’t let you drive near the edge, but you can walk over to a big concrete N and peer past it down into the crater to try to get a glimpse of the red lava in the depths. The camera saw this tiny bit of red better than I did!