Welcome to Slide Night at Back in a Bit. Sit back, relax and get ready to travel far away from your desk and your sore computer eyes as we share our favourite travel snaps and the quirky stories behind them.

Photographer Sally Johnson is direct marketing manager at Intrepid Travel, and, along with her photographer husband, runs Melbourne-based photography business Dally Street.

Pacaya National Park, Guatemala (click to enlarge)
Pacaya National Park, Guatemala (click to enlarge)

Shot using: Canon EOS 20D  f/6.3  1/125sec  100ISO  Focal length 120mm

Sally writes: Volcan Pacaya looms over the picturesque colonial town of Antigua and is easy to reach on one of Guatelmala’s famed ‘chicken buses’. It first erupted approx 23,000 years ago and was pretty much dormant for a century before violently erupting in 1965. It has been fairly active ever since.

I climbed old Pacaya in 2006 just after an increase in its volcanic activity allowed for the creation of several lava rivers that slowly flow down its slope.

As you near the top of Pacaya, every fibre of your being does question whether climbing a live volcano without having received much of a safety briefing is the greatest of ideas. But hey, it’s not like you get to have the soles of your runners melt on many hikes, is it?

The huge display of heat and power was incredible and I re-discovered that sense of wonder you achieve after building a volcano model in primary school — not quite sure how it all works but being impressed all the same.

We spent a couple of hours around the top of old Pacaya throwing sticks into the lava to watch them ignite into flame and comparing the degree of destruction to our shoes, before hiking back down. I kept my melted shoes as a souvenir.

Have you got an amazing travel snap (jpeg format, s’il vous plait) and story you’d like to share on ‘Slide Night’? You don’t have to be a professional and it doesn’t have to be “exotic”. Just send it through to ajamieson@crikey.com.au