A paved road leads all the way up to the crater, the one the Spanish baptized “La Boca del Infierno.” The landscape changes from lush and verdant to dry and rocky, only short, little patches of grass and a few stubby bushes managing to survive. When I get out of the van, the sulfur smell makes me recoil just as the volcano draws me in. I reach the crater quickly. When I peer over the rock wall that borders it, I feel awe-struck at the sight. Giddy and woozy and awe-struck. The crater descends quickly, rocky for several hundred feet, and then a huge, gaping hole with gases rising out of it in a thick, constant stream. The massive hole glows red at the bottom, where the lava seems to undulate like waves. My eyes sting, and I start to cough, and I realize I can’t stand inside the cloud of gases much longer.

More Doors

Blue Door, Red Door

Even under the cloud-covered morning sky, the force of the tropical heat pushes down on me, as oppressive as the heavy clouds. I walk on wet, shiny streets to Parque Central in Granada, Nicaragua, drawn to the majestic colonial architecture. On the steps outside the Centro Cultural Museos Convento San Francisco—with its own impressive Spanish colonial doors—the top of my head feels distinctly hot. I look up to see cloudless blue, the temperature and the aspect of the sky finally matching. Inside the museum and converted convent dozens of colorful wooden parrots hover between the teal blue ceiling and the ground. Folk art, all dots and waves and clear colors, is mounted on lime green walls. In one of the museum's courtyards, I stop in front of a fountain behind which hangs two colonial doors, a blue one and a red one, as part of an art installation. Which door to take? And where would it lead?

Parque Central, Granada

Granada's Parque Central is flanked by two-story, columned buildings in Easter-candy colors. It would look like a Disney attraction or the set of a movie except for the weathering—wet, dark tracks that begin at the ground and creep upwards. The first time I saw it, when Calle La Libertad ended and opened into the park, I reeled. I'd seen this square before but only in pictures, lots and lots of pictures, and seeing it in real life was uncanny. I looked over my shoulder for cars or motorcycles and crossed the street, immediately recognizing the squat trees with waxy leaves manicured into blunt rectangles, the fenced-in fountain with its lemon yellow trim and pale turquoise water, and the coral gazebo that sits in the middle of the park like the pendant on a cameo necklace. But the weathering, that was more prominent than in pictures; in fact the heat, which my light coat trapped against my skin, and the rain, and the weathering they created, were all more noticeable than I had imagined. But they made Granada more real, more wholly itself—not something I could have ever imagined from pictures or travelogues.