The Volcano

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After arriving in Colombia on Wednesday and then spending Thursday meeting some school people, touring the school and seeing a bit of the city, the school set us (and when I say 'us', I mean the two other North American teachers, who we will refer to as K and E, K's mom C, who is visiting for the first week or two, and me) up with a trip to Cartagena, the 5th largest city in Colombia (right behind my hometown Barranquilla), and is about 100 km west, along the Caribbean coast. Cartagena (Carta-hay-na) is known for its old city, which dates back to the 1500s, and was the target of several famous pirate attacks!

I'm not going to tell you about Cartagena today, though - rather, I'd like to tell you about something we did on the way. Namely, we bathed in a volcano.

There's the volcano! Okay, it's not that impressive as far as volcanoes go.

There were literally no other tourists at this place when we got there, even though there were something lke 30 or 40 employees ('employees' is a loose term - lots of them were just hanging out, and somehow I doubt there was any sort of pay structure, employment insurance or union).

So we had the place to ourselves. As soon as we had figured out how to pay, we changed, and started up the rickety staircase. Soon enough, I was climbing down into the hot, molten lava.



Wait, actually I forgot, we weren't bathing in hot, molten lava. It was a mud volcano.

And it was so weird.

It was the most buoyant substance I've ever been in, so when we lay down we were actually lying on top of the mud. The funniest part was when the guys organized us into a row of mud people; they first oriented us correctly, and then slid each one of us into our proper slot, like they were parking us. Being the last one of the four in, I had the privilege of seeing this process in action. Below is the result.



After we were shuttled into our places, the three guys spent about half an hour giving us massages. They also had to periodically wipe mud out of our ears and eyes. It was probably more effective than trying to hop on one leg, though given the density of the mud (the guys weren't standing on anything), we probably could actually have hopped.

About halfway through, we were flipped over so that the dudes could work our backs...

Lower... lower... too low! Lower...

After the dudes finished with the massages, we got to play around for a while. I spelled my name and drew pictures on the surface, a testament to how thick that stuff was. When upright, we came to equilibrium when the mud was about at our belly buttons, and it was almost impossible to go down any further without someone pushing us down. Not that there wasn't anywhere to go; apparently, the thing is 2300 meters deep!

Eventually we were forced out because the next group arrived.

Um, they had a lot of people.

Whereas we spent more than 30 minutes getting massaged and generally frolicking, they got about 5 minutes, if that. And many of them didn't get massages. Also, there were at least as many people waiting in line as you can see in that picture.

The early bird gets the mud volcano massage, I guess.