Just call me Lara Croft!

Yes ladies and gentlemen, yesterday I climbed a volcano and saw (and heard) real, live glowing lava. I am indeeed an action heroine, now fully equipped to ride horses, scale volcanoes, dive deep seas and do any number of other adventure-type activities!!! At least, that is what I will let you believe for these first, brief moments....

Would love to say that the hike was amazing, worth the effort etc, but it wasn´t!!! The volcano itself was amazing, and incredible to see lava - it really was like looking into the middle of the earth, albeit 25m below us. However, in order to witness this miracle of natural science, we first had to slog through the most hellish hike known to man. In other words 8km on the most dusty road (we are talking inches thick in dust) I have ever encountered and all in what we now discover was 96 degree heat! My lovely white t-shirt was such a bad idea! we then had a 2km (seemingly vertical) hike to the top of the bloody thing and i really thought at one point i wasn´t going to make it. However, realised this would make for a v poor blog entry and so decided to carry on - look at the things I do you for you dear friends, and you all thought this was a year of decadent self-indulgence! Anyway, managed to recover at the top, marvelled at the lava (whilst feeling simultaneously sick with my first bit of vertigo!) and then watched sun set over ocean (aarh!) before returning to camp for dinner and a camp fire. At this point the pain of the day was behind me, had pasta in my tummy and my legs weren´t aching anymore so felt at one with the world and even managed polite conversation with the token irritating German in our group.

This morning, however, after a horrid nights sleep (i either wore my fleece but couldn´t sleep due to lack of pillow or used fleece as pillow and couldn´t sleep due to being freezing - remembered at 2am exactly why it is I dont go camping) we then had to hike back down. Deeply, deeply unhappy by 8km on dusty road and kept falling over all the time due to poor combination of slight dehydration, extreme tiredness and poor co-ordination!! This was the first (and hopefully only) time I wished I was back at St G!

However, R and I are now safely ensconced in nice hostel, have scrubbed ourselves clean of the layer of dirt (Mum, if you thought i was grubby after India, that had nothing on what i looked like at midday today!) and aer now looking forward to a lovely ice-cream based treat! Flor de cana rum factory and then beach are beckonning tommorrow in the rather random world that is mine life at the moment!!!