Volcano and festival fun!

Check this video out of the dancers from the other night! I love the old guy in black in the background - he's a mover!!

We had a great day in the field yesterday. The volcano put on a nice show for us with an explosion on the morning as we were driving towards it, and when we were on our way back the fumaroles were steaming away!

It was another cracking sunny day, although it clouded over for a time, which was really nice to have some cool weather. We spent the day looking at more road cuts. Most of them have collapsed a bit so we had to dig a lot to see the lower units, and scrape the surface off the exposed units to see them better. I collected more pieces of rocks to measure, and my correlations of the eruption deposits across the area is coming along.

In the evening there was a Caballgata in Villa de Alvarez as part of the festival. It's a big parade with dancers, musicians, clowns, horses - it was really cool. My camera battery died, so I'll do my best to describe it to you. The street was buzzing by the time it started. People were milling about everywhere - groups with coolboxes full of beer, families with small kids running around, old folks camped out on benches, groups of lads getting more drunk as the time passed, teenage girls in massive high heals and checked shirts tied up at the front parading up and down the street, and the odd tourist caught up in the mayhem wondering what was going on! It was a great atmosphere. There was a big stand for people to sit in which was rammed. The people sat there were getting really possessive of their space and were yelling at people to stay away! It was great! When it started, fireworks were set off right in the middle of it all! What a fright I got when the first one went off!! Then came a truck with 2 guys playing a flute and a drum, followed by dancers wearing big papier mache puppets of famous people of Colima - they were about 10 feet high. Then there was a band, then clowns throwing sweets into the crowd, then the festival Queen on horseback, followed by all the cowboys on horseback and 2 drunk men!! All the while, the crowds were dancing and singing along.