A lot of times when I want to do something I'll kind of look into it, talk about it some, but then never really get out there and do it, but my St Maarten BFF Eleya is just the opposite. When she says, "I'm going to go to Puerto Rico to go to Wal-Mart" you can bet she'll be on a plane there by the week-end. So the other day we were all eating dinner and Eleya and Stacy were like, "Hey, lets go to Statia this weekend! You in?". An 8 hour hike up and into an ancient volcano? Wouldn't miss it! So early Friday morning I found myself running- literally running in my new hiking boots- alongside Eleya to the airport so we could hop on the tiny plane that was headed to Statia. It was the smallest aircraft I've ever been in. Seriously, I've been in buses bigger than this thing. (When I get my camera software in working order you can expect a vid of the exhilerating approach and landing on the little island.)
We stayed in a nice little hotel that was really just a house with a few additional bedrooms built on the back. The hike was AMAZING! It was a fairly technical hike, with a good bit of bouldering along the Mazinga trail. We got up at daybreak to get an early jump on the thing, and got back down off the volcano just as the sun set. The scariest thing to me was the snakes. Indiana Jones would have hated it. There were snakes EVERYWHERE. I lost count after two dozen. They were all the same kind of snakes- non-poisonous red belly racers. Even though you know they're not poisonous they're still terrifying because some of them are HUGE, and they're not just on the ground. I reached out my hand to grab a tree to help pull me up a steep rock wall, and a giant snake hung down off the branch right in front of my face. If my friends hadn't of been there, I probably would've jumped off the mountain.
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