By Steve Wilson

Excerpted from Travelers' Tales Central America

Is the volcano crawling with bandits?

It began with German Frank banging his fist onto the table in our hotel kitchen. He was drinking cheap orange wine as he did every night, seeking visions of our future.

“Pacaya!”

“What?”

“Pacaya! We climb Pacaya!”

“Okay, calm down. We’ll climb it.”

“Pacaya! Pacaya! Pacaya! Pacaya!”

This was not unusual. We had followed the sound of Frank’s voice from town to town through Mexico and into Guatemala.

“We climb Pacaya!”

One of four active volcanoes in Guatemala, Volcán Pacaya has been continuously active since 1965, often erupting up to several thousand times a day. Located only eighteen miles from Guatemala City, Pacaya is the most accessible and most often-climbed volcano in the country.

Probably because of that, Pacaya also is reputedly crawling with bandidos. Mention Pacaya to your hotel owner, say, or your Spanish teacher, and receive an earful of warnings. I soon had an image of a mountain covered in short Lee Van Cleefs, all of them hiding in the dark and rattling with weapons. According to rumors, the hills around Pacaya hid more highwaymen than trees.

However, from what we saw around town, it seemed more likely that Pacaya would be covered with tourists. Every tour company in Antigua offers a volcano trip, and on every corner in Antigua stands a tour company. That’s a lot of traffic on one volcano.

“Pacaya!”

“Shut up, Frank. We’ll go tomorrow.”

We would go on our own out of pride and poverty and a certain sympathy for the unemployed. If we were to be robbed, we decided, let it be by Guatemalans with guns, not gringos armed with cash registers and minivans.

In the morning we set out for the Offfice of Tourism for help in finding the right bus. Our assistant was called Señor Fernandez, a fat squat man behind a big desk, his face as round and emotionless as a dinner plate. He stood without speaking, crossed the room, and halted before a road map of Antigua. He pointed to a street corner.

“Go here,” he said sternly. “There is a tour agency. They will take you to the volcán in a nice microbus, with an armed guard. If you go to Pacaya alone you will die.” He paused dramatically and without expression. “I will not be held responsible for your deaths.”

“We don’t want to go with a tour group,” I said. “Can’t you tell us which bus goes there?”

“No. I would be sending you to your death.”

“I promise that if we die we won’t hold you responsible,” said Dave.

Señor Fernandez gave him a look.

“Last week three people were robbed. People are killed. It is very dangerous. If you choose to take it lightly, do so, but I will not be part of it.” He turned and retreated to his desk.

“Not very helpful,” I commented.

“Maybe we should hire a guard,” Alex said.

“That’ll cost too much.”

“We could buy our own rifle,” said Dave.

“Who’s going to shoot it?” I asked.

“I will,” he said.

“You’d shoot a man because he tried to rob you of twenty dollars?”

Dave thought about this.

“Okay, forget the rifle.”

“Let’s go,” said Frank. “We just go. We don’t bring a lot of money. They either rob us or they don’t.”

“The bandidos will never rob us,” said Dave. “We’ll stick to the shadows and move silently, like wraiths in the night.”

Raving in the night was more like it. From bus to bus we traveled, emerging into waning daylight at the Pacaya turnoff, a dirt road bordered by the endless confused tropical green. We waited.

A pickup turned off the paved road onto ours.

“Ah, our chariot.”

“Pacaya?”

“Si. ”

The truck bed was full of women and children who stared or giggled as we clambered in. We sat with butts over the edge, shoulder to shoulder, and hip to hip. Next to me sat a wiry gent in his forties wearing spotless clothing, whose temples shone in the sun like polished stone. The shining-faced man watched Alex, who is clumsy, Frank, who is large. He gave the bedrolls consideration.

“You are climbing Volcán Pacaya?” He spoke softly and earnestly.

“Ja,” said German Frank.

“There are many bad hombres.”

“Bandidos?”

“Sí—you should have a guide.”

“We have weapons,” said Frank.

“They have pistolas too,” the shining-faced man said, shrugging.

“We have more,” Frank insisted. “Pistols, rifles, machetes...”

The shining-faced man nodded seriously. The shining parts of his head slid through the sunlight.

I asked, “How can you tell they’re bandidos?”

“You will know when you see one.”

“How do we avoid them?”

“Walk with guns in your hands.”

“What if we stayed off the road and walked through the woods?”

He shook his head. “That is where they hide.”

“You seem to know a lot about bandidos,” Dave said.

The man shrugged.

Frank said, “We’re here to make sure nobody hurts any of the tourists.”

“You are mercenaries.”

“Ja. ”

“Where is your tour group?”

“They will be coming soon.”

“Oh.”

“Ja, we’re advance scouts, you see.”

I looked away, up the road. Frank often lied for the sheer joy of it, but I assumed that these lies had a purpose. We had been told repeatedly that everybody on the mountain was a bandido, or a bandido scout, and evidently Frank had decided to believe it. And why not? I believed it, too. Perhaps the shining-faced man was one. The reflective surface of his skin was efficient enough to send messages. Bandidos could be appraised of potential customers through Morse code. Perhaps appraised of our arrival. Waiting. Guns and mustaches.

We bumped past milpas of maize tended by the moving forms of thin, bent farmers. Because of the cramped seating arrangement and uneven road, it became difficult to sit upright. To keep from falling backwards we linked arms with the person seated opposite.

Far below, Guatemala City glinted like dirty ice spilled over the valley floor. On opposite ends of the valley, miles apart, loomed the volcanoes Fuego and Agua. Agua we knew because it was the first thing we saw when looking out our hotel window. It was huge and solitary, a tall tight peak that seemed to be pushing itself away from the earth’s center and taking the land with it. Fuego looked identical but Fuego was active and Agua dormant. Smoke often drifted away from Fuego’s peak.

As we gained in elevation the road passed between fields of coffee, leaving the tropical lushness and entering a region of thin, malnourished pines. When the road branched downward, toward a small village, the truck stopped.

“Pacaya is that way,” the shining-faced man said, pointing up.

We climbed out. He addressed us again, in a quiet and secretive tone.

“It is a strange place, Pacaya...it is high and it is cold, but it is hot. Very windy. You should not go alone.”

This last suggestion seemed to linger as he fixed us with his radiant temples. The truck lurched off. The children waved good-bye.

“What a strange man.”

“He was like a character out of a fairy tale.”

“Do you think that was a bad omen?”

“You should not go alone.”

Dave giggled. “Who’s alone?”

We started walking. You should not go alone. Mysterious advice from a mysterious stranger. It would be quite fitting if there were dozens of these shining-faced men standing at strategic locations along the road. They could stop the tour busses, deliver their cryptic messages, and vanish before everybody had stopped saying, “What?” It would add a little atmosphere to the trip.

Night fell as we walked. Lit by stars and the lights of Guatemala City, our road was a wide sandy gash through the dark dark green. At crossroads we made guesses, flipped coins, and followed tire tracks. We were standing at one intersection, arguing over which way to go, when a Volkswagen bus drove by, honking. On the side of it was written, “Volcano Tours!”

“At least they’re good for something,” I said, as we strode after them.

The village of San Francisco, the last village on the road, consisted of twelve buildings, several disheveled dogs, and one electric light inside the one tienda. Leaning against the tienda’s front wall were three swarthy men who stopped talking to observe us. Above them was a photo of the Rubio Man (the Marlboro Man’s Latin cousin) having a smoke on a ridge next to the words, “Esta Tierra Es Mi Tierra. ”

“Subtle bandido humor,” Dave said.

One of the three men approached us, a shy gentleman wearing a straw hat and an unshaven smile. He stopped before us, thumbs in pockets.

“You climb Pacaya?”

“Yes.”

“You would like a guide?”

“Why?”

“It is dark, and easy to get lost, and there are bandidos. I can take you there safely.”

“We were O.K. last time,” said Frank.

“You have been before?”

“Dozens of times,” said Frank, with a loose, dismissive wave of his right hand. “We’re geologists. We climb every week to measure the lava output.”

The guide shrugged and stood there listening to us for a while before slowly turning and walking back to the others.
“Do you think he was a bandido scout, too?”

“Probably everybody in this town is a bandido. I mean, if you had a choice between that or picking coffee beans, what would you do?”

Frank, who had climbed Pacaya six years earlier with a tour group (in the daylight), led us away from the tienda.
“We go this way,” Frank said confidently.

We went down a broad track between widely spaced houses. After the houses it narrowed, then stopped. Frank asked an old man for directions.

He pointed to the forest to our right. Frank thanked him.

“You should have a guide,” the old man said, shaking his head.

Not another one, I thought. This is getting silly.

We followed Frank into the woods on a narrow path past trees no thicker than my wrist. There was little foliage and we could see stars through the tangle of branches. Under the branches we could barely see each other. Of course, nobody had remembered to bring a flashlight. This was annoying until Alex stumbled and fell with a splendid thud.

“He moves like a wraith in the night,” I said.

Dave and Frank were cackling with laughter.

“Hello, bandidos! Here we are!”

“Nice bandidos! We’re walking through your forest!”

The trail reflected a slight silver shine, like the path of a slug that vanished and appeared between the shadows of trees. We followed it, lost it, followed another. Lost in the woods. It’s not so bad in a warm land, where there are no bears, and people live in the middle of nowhere and can rescue you. Better to be lost in Guatemala than in Alaska.

“Is this the way you went last time, Frank?”

“Oh, no, we stayed on the road.”

“Maybe we should be on the road, you know, just for old times’ sake.”

“So where are they?” Alex asked.

“Who?”

“The bandidos.”

“Probably lurking and pillaging.”

“Do you think we’ll meet any? I’m kind of surprised we haven’t.”

“Maybe they all take Sunday off?”

“They’re probably closer to the volcano,” Dave pointed out. “They would have more clients there. I mean, they’re not going to be roaming around in the woods waiting for idiots like us.”

“You’re the expert.”

In Peru, Shining Path rebels had captured Dave and two Israelis at gunpoint on a mountain path. They were blindfolded and led to a cabin, where they were questioned about their political beliefs, then lectured on the errors of Imperialism and the virtues of Marxism. After a couple of hours, realizing he was not going to be shot, Dave said aloud, “Nobody is ever going to believe this.”

One of his hosts, hearing him, asked how they could help him convince people. His reply: How about a picture?

“This was not a very popular idea with everybody, and I was wondering if I’d said the wrong thing,” Dave told me. “There was this big discussion and then they decided it was appropriate as long as their faces were masked. So we went outside and all the Shining Path put hats and sunglasses on, you know, or scarves across their faces, and the Israelis went and sat on the ground in front of them.”

He had showed it to us, a group photo of these masked men and women standing close to each other with very serious expressions, each one with a gun raised beside his or her head. And kneeling before them were two curly-haired men grinning as if it was a photo of their college graduation. The whole thing looked like a farce—perhaps a photo of the attendees of a costume party.

Dave said, “It was interesting how much power that camera had. Even though they had all the guns, I was definitely part of the ruling class there, with a dominant social status. Nobody suggested that one of the Shining Path take the photo. It really changed the whole dynamic of the meeting. We became sort of honored guests, rather than prisoners. Although we still couldn’t leave.”

The next morning, after each made a voluntary donation, they were released.

“You shouldn’t have stuck to the trail,” Frank said. “You never would have been captured if you were lost.”

Dave said, “Yeah, I think that getting lost in the woods is a pretty good strategy for avoiding bandidos. But you know, I had a thought about these bandidos and the bandido scouts. I think they work for the tour groups.”

“What?”

“Yeah, all these guys warning us about the bandidos, they work for the tour groups. Maybe the bandidos even work for the tour groups. Their job is to scare the tourists into paying for the trip.”

“That’s very devious.”

“Makes sense, though.”

It did make sense. Maybe the bandidos didn’t exist at all. The whole thing could be a construct of the tour companies and the wretched Señor Fernandez.

We followed the trail to a barbed wire fence that enclosed a small garden. Wide dark leaves covered the ground. A small white house lurked down the hillside. We stepped quietly and carefully through the garden, then back over the barbed wire and onto another trail, or the same interrupted trail.

Almost immediately we came across a clearing. Frank, who was the first to enter, stopped suddenly, pointing. We froze. I heard a stick break, then saw the bushes on the other side of the clearing move.

“Steve,” he said loudly, “dame la pistola.”

“Here is the pistol,” I shouted from ten feet away.

“Danke für die pistole,” he yelled.

“De nada.”

We watched the bushes. Nobody moved. My heart thumped. I was ready either to run or fall to my knees, begging for mercy.

Dave giggled nervously. There was the sound of something pushing past branches, then two horses clopped into the clearing, chewing on something green. A slight embarrassment passed between Frank and me.

“Perhaps the bandidos dress in horse costumes to lure their victims into a false sense of security,” Dave commented.

We looked carefully at the horses. They continued to chew.

Very briefly I had the thought that a group of bandidos might be hiding nearby, watching our reactions to the horses, to see if we actually did have weapons. But this was just a fleeting fantasy. The bitter, disappointing truth was that we were unworthy of the bandidos’ attentions.

We left the clearing and within five minutes were standing on the road. Before us was a hill, nearly bare of vegetation, topped by a television transmission tower.

“We go this way,” said Frank.

We climbed to the top of the hill, where the strong wind blew our shirts against our left sides and flapped them away to the right. We could see the MacKenney crater, a dark, rocky depression in the top of the mountain created when an earlier cone had exploded. The new cone, about 300 feet high, grew out of the middle of the crater like an island in an ancient, dry lake bed. The cone was smaller than I had expected.

As we watched, it erupted. From the tip of the cone burst a bright red fountain of red-hot rocks (called bombs), lighting up the sky around the volcano. The bombs shot high into the dark sky, then plummeted in slowly curving arcs back to the earth while a huge cloud of evil-looking black smoke blew off to the west. The erupting lava was surprisingly red, like neon. Suddenly, climbing to the top of an active volcano seemed like a very stupid thing to do.

“We’re all going to die,” I said.

“But what a glorious death.”

“You see what a great place I bring you to?”

“You’re our hero, Frank.”

No more than five minutes passed between eruptions. Pacaya, a Strombolian-type volcano, is mostly full of hydrogen gases, its lava very liquid. Pacaya mostly lacks the solid matter necessary to block a vent, which can create the buildup of pressure that leads to a top-blowing explosion.

Although Pacaya’s major eruptions have been small in comparison with those of other volcanoes, such as Mt. St. Helens, it occasionally builds up to some large blasts. In March 2000 a powerful eruption caused two nearby villages to be evacuated. A few months earlier, Pacaya sent 800-meter-high fountains of lava into the air. Villages were again evacuated and the ash from the eruptions shut down the Guatemala City airport.

The large and small eruptions had turned the area surrounding Pacaya into a zone of lifelessness. Even at night we could see that the land was built of shades of gray and brown: rocks and dirt and ash. A few scrappy plants had pushed their way through the ash cover to the air, and didn’t look too happy about it.

To our left a ridge curved around the crater, losing elevation until the two met. We followed a well-worn path along the ridge, through a bit of ragged forest, and down. Just before the ridge ended, on the barest, most windswept section, we were stopped by an odd sight. A dozen people in sleeping bags, enveloped by huge, clear, plastic tarps. The ground was so barren that they appeared to be camped on the moon. It was a tour group. I felt sorry for the paying customers—they must have been freezing. It was cold enough to see our breath. The tarps snapped and popped in the wind.

From one of the sleeping bags came a flashlight beam and an unclear query.

“Don’t worry,” said Frank, “we won’t harm you. We only want your women.”

“What?”

“Why don’t you guys camp in the woods?” Dave asked.

“Bandits,” the voice said. “Don’t you guys know anything? This mountain is crawling with them.”

The only thing this mountain is crawling with tonight are tourists, I thought. Maybe we were too eager. There must be certain rules the bandidos operate by, and one of them must be to rob only those people who do not wish to be robbed. If sought out, they hide.

At any rate, we were at the base of the volcano, and we had seen neither blade nor bullet. The bandidos would have another chance at us on our way down. But now Pacaya beckoned. It roared and rumbled. It burst forth like the end of the world. Frank and Dave were the first to move, walking then running toward it across the crater floor, through soft silty ash.

Pacaya’s cone was covered with ash. Not just covered with it, but built of ash, layer upon layer of ash and rock. From a hole in the ground the cone had been spewed one piece at a time. The ash was both thick and chunky, like burned scraps of peanuts, and fine as the soot of a burnt paper bag. It gave way easily. Step up two feet, slide back down one. We stopped often to breathe and look at the view.

When Pacaya prepared to erupt I could feel the rumbling in my legs. We stopped to look up, then looked at each other nervously. As we approached the peak the eruptions felt stronger. The ground kept shaking and stopping and shaking again.

Then we were standing on the rim, looking into the cone. My heart was pounding from excitement and fear and thin air. The rim was about thirty yards across. The wind was very strong and I thought that if it gusted it would blow us in. We peered over the edge. The interior of the cone sloped down, toward its own center, like a funnel. At the lowest and narrowest point were two holes beside each other, both large enough to drop an elephant through. Bombs popped up and fell back through the holes. We could see smoke and a lambent red glow, as if from a hidden forge.

Below us we could see the lights of Guatemala City, and in the other direction, a few stars. Dave ventured to the other side of the cone, where the gases and rocks were thick and moving, and came back coughing to tell us not to.

We were giddy with excitement. Thoughts of bandidos, tour groups, horses, the shining-faced man, all were gone. The volcano was all we could fit within our skulls.

Pacaya erupted again, with the sound of an avalanche. The ground shook, smoke rushed and boiled into the air, and red-hot bombs lit the smoke as they plunged through. The smoke slipped over the edge with the wind, as smooth and fluid as breath. The bombs plummeted onto the far side of the cone, invisible and loud.

“Yahoooo!”

“It is high and it is cold!” Dave yelled.

“But it is hot!”

We all laughed and swore as Pacaya shook with another rush of noise and smoke and fire, so sudden it made me jump. The molten rocks rose in clumps, separating and curving away from each other like flaming cannonballs. Smoke filled the air above the cone and immediately was blown down the western slope of the cone and away. Nobody had words to express their excitement. We were reduced to jumping and shouting, which is sometimes the best way to express yourself.

“What do you think?” I yelled at Dave, over the noise of wind and eruption.

He shook his head.

“It’s too much,” he said, tapping his head, “it’s too much!”

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Steve Wilson writes regularly for Transitions Abroad and contributed a story to Travelers’ Tales Hawaii. He lives in Portland, Oregon.