A journey through Central America is a trip along the spine of one of the world’s most dramatic and spectacular volcanic ranges. I was already in El Salvador when I got an email from a friend back in Panama City. They had just gone through two big earthquakes she told me. The whole city had shuddered and seemed to drop a couple of feet – like the first sickening fall in a roller-coaster. Then all was quiet again. There were a few more cracks in the crumbling colonial plasterwork but even among the rickety shacks in the old town there was no major damage. This whole region has been quivering and shuddering since time immemorial.

In Managua there is a morbid museum where you can imagine the final horrific minutes of a small band of Managuan ‘citizens’ who roamed this area about 5,000 years ago. Their last footprints – as they were escaping a great eruption of Volcán Masaya, fifteen miles away – have been preserved in what was once a river of ash and molten rock. You can see from the widely spaced tracks that the people were running.

I once felt the tail edge of a powerful earthquake in Peru. I was camping on a beach a long way from the epicentre and it was probably only because my back was flat on a bedroll directly on the sand that I felt the vibrations. Meanwhile ancient buildings in Arequipa were crashing to the street. In Ecuador, on another trip, I slept straight through another ‘terremoto.’ This time it was my hammock strings that muffled the shock like a sailor sleeping through a storm. I woke in the morning to find a collapsed shelf and all my kit on the floor. The village dogs had been going crazy in the night apparently and I was really disappointed that I slept like a baby right through the ruckus.

During this trip the Pan-Am Highway has already brought me past more than a score of spectacular volcanoes as I’ve travelled northwards. From the flanks of mighty Baru in Panama I rattled through Costa Rica past Volcan Poás, Irazú and Arenal (which also erupted dramatically just as I arrived in the country). As you cross into Nicaragua almost the first sight you see are the dramatic cones of volcanoes Concepción and Madera rising out of Lake Nicaragua and Managua itself is surrounded by threatening cones. Then you pass through Honduras and the great volcanic ridge that is the El Salvador highlands. Boquerón (Big Mouth) is the local name for the deep crater that haunts the people of San Salvador.

Then you are in Guatemala. In the west of the country it seems that you are never out of sight of a volcano. On an earlier visit to Guatemala, several years ago, I climbed Volcan Agua and spent an ill-equipped and freezing night on the summit. On another evening I climbed Pacaya and (in infinitely warmer conditions) dodged flying ash and flames that shot hundred metres into the air. I sat to rest on rocks that were almost too hot to touch.

The Central American ‘land-bridge’ is one of the most active volcanic areas on our planet. There are no less than forty-two active volcanoes here, and eighteen others that are still in states of brooding, bubbling, threatening readiness. Central America rocks!