Woo!! Mission accomplished! Cotopaxi has been on the cards ever since Ecuador 3 years ago. More later.
I left Uyuni as planned on day 69, getting the bumpiest and shakiest night bus ever (the road was basically a 100km washboard for the first 4h, meaning I only got about 4h sleep in total). I arrived in La Paz at about 7am, got to Adventure Brew Hostel - they've got a microbrewery and they're right beside the station, so 60Bs (GBP6 per night including a free beer) seemed acceptable considering the number of recommendations I'd had for it. Anyway, I got there, dumped my stuff, went down to ask about laundry and bumped into Hayden, Claire and Dominic who I'd met in Sucre a few times. They gave me free breakfast (it was all you can eat pancakes), and said they were doing Death Road that day, leaving pretty damn soon. I thought I might as well join them, so went to cycle down the most dangerous road in the world when I was sleep deprived, wearing completely the wrong clothes, and it just happened to be snowing at the top of it. Also, when we got to the top, it turned out they'd forgotten to grab extra knee/shin pads for me when they nipped to the office to get the bike.
Either way, it was a pretty exhilarating ride. Hayden works with bikes back in Oz and is a pretty good downhill mountain biker, so he was pushing the guide the whole way down the mountain. That meant if I wanted the benefit of the guide and knowing where to break I had to absolutely nail it! Very nearly crashed into the cliff face a couple of times, but managed to avoid having any close calls with the 600m drops that give the road its name. Dominik was slightly faster than me, but he was having exactly the same problems, and he had a lot more close calls, so I think in the state I was in I made the right call on speed. Claire (Hayden's girlfriend) was absolutely not a biker before that day, so was at the back but never really going at all that slow a pace. There's a big descent from 4700m to 1100m (the lowest I had been in over 2 months), which means that when you get to the bottom, despite a massive adrenalin rush and lots of exercise, you barely need to breathe! Anyway, our guide was a bit of a party animal, so we grabbed some bottles of Cuba Libre and went to a little hotel with a pool and a buffet lunch. On the bus back to La Paz we were all drunk enough to forget I hadn't paid, and the next day I got a call to the hostel asking for money. I told Cello (he didn't know English when he got his nickname) to come in for a beer, and he gave me a wee discount!
The rest of my time in La Paz was a little more restful. I got to know the hostel staff a bit, got a tour round the brewery and invited for a first taste of the filtered amber beer they were opening on my final day there, and just generally chilled out a bit - not what most people seem to do in La Paz!! Anyway, just as I was leaving I met an Aussie guy who was also going to Copacabana on Lake Titicaca, so we grabbed the bus together, and managed to find a 10Bs hostel - we were pretty happy!! The next day we went to the Isla del Sol (birthplace of both the Sun and the first Inca, according to that crazy extinct civilisation) and finished the bottle of Ledaig I'd brought from Oxford, then went our separate ways on buses in Peru that night. As you might have guessed from how quick that was, I can't really be arsed with Inca culture and history - it's just over-touristified for the wrong reasons. Was still a really cool day, a nice wee walk and we got some excellent trout.
Anyway, Peru. It's now just a week ago that I got to Cusco, and I must have been absolutely nailing it round the gringo circuit to get there so quickly! After arriving in town at 5am (I don't get it why so few buses in South America arrive/leave at sensible times), I went to a hostel that a few Aussies (seeing a theme?) on the Isla del Sol had recommended - Pariwana. It was good, friendly, and they let me and a Swiss girl I met on the bus sleep in the TV room that was covered in cushions until we could actually organise something about checking in. Since check in was at 1, I also got on the internet and found the cheap way to get to Machu Picchu (make sure you pronounce both 'c's, otherwise you're saying 'old penis' in Quechua). When I was out trying to find some snacks and water for the trip I bumped into Carmen and Kirsty, a pair of English girls who had been volunteering in big cat sanctuaries in the Bolivian jungle, who were about as foolish and cheap as me, so I told them to come along.
On Monday (after dancing with a Peruvian girl til about 4am), I met them at the bus station at 6.30 in the morning. Turns out it was the wrong bus station, so we went to the other one, got a bus to Santa Maria (at the far end of the Sacred Valley) that left 30min late at 7.30, and finally arrived after being hit by a minor landslide (no damage, just a few scared tourists and a lot of scared Peruvians) 7h later. We then grabbed a collectivo to the new hydroelectric plant that's 12km from Aguas Calientes, the girls stopped for a piss and I got at least 90 mosquito bites, then we walked for a couple of hours beside the train tracks. Arrival in Aguas Calientes cost us 28 soles (about GBP 6.50) compared to a train from Cusco for USD56, as well as throwing in a bit of an adventure. When we got there we grabbed our tickets for the park the next day and ran off to the little spa that kind of gave the town its name. Having been out so late the night before, I had barely been able to eat all day (breakfast was 3 croissants at 4.30pm), so we needed dinner pretty badly after the spa. An alpaca heart just wasn't enough, so I wolfed down a 2 person pizza as well, but having spent 50 soles already on a meal I couldn't justify sating my hunger properly with another main or a desert.
It was another night of minimal sleep that night, I got about 4h and then we were up and out at 3.30 to walk up the hill to make sure we got the stamps on our tickets for Huayna Picchu - the big hill that's in all the photos. Unfortunately (this doesn't seem to usually be the case), the bridge at the bottom of the valley was shut until 4.55, so we wasted quite a bit of time hanging around that could have been spent sleeping. Then there was a mad adrenaline-fuelled rush of a couple of hundred people up the 400m vertical staircase to get in the queue (they let 2000 people into the Machu Picchu site every day, but only 400 can climb 'young penis' as we kept accidentally calling it). Kirsty wasn't feeling so good that morning, but she decided to walk up anyway instead of getting the bus, and Carmen and I stormed up. It turned out Kirsty was worse than we thought - she vomited 13 times on the way up, but still did it in a time that the guidebooks reckon isn't bad, and was probably one of the last people to get a stamp! Still, she wasn't in a fit state, and we left her on a rock to sleep for a bit while we went exploring.
As it happens, Machu Picchu is just like a massive playground if you're used to high altitudes. It's down at about 2450m or so, so we could run about on all the staircases without issue. I ended up trying to get down to the lower terraces, then realised at 9.50 that I had to run up the hill again because I'd promised to meet Carmen and Chris (guy I'd met in the hostel in Cusco) at 10 for climbing Huayna Picchu. Chris and I then basically ran up the hill until we bumped into a slow group, waited for the next slow group to almost reach us then did the same again, so by the time I got to the top my legs were kind of exercised, but my lungs were barely feeling it! Still, we had to get some funny photos for the Varsity Trip photo competition (back up for if my Cotopaxi plan failed), so I grabbed a bottle of water I didn't really trust because I'd found it in a cave, faced away from the camera, and pretended to pee on Machu Picchu. Classy, I know! On the way down, I convinced Carmen to go to the Gran Caverne without really knowing where it was, and it was a beautifully treacherous path that descended much further than I'd hoped. We both had the shakes in our legs on the way down, and it was a pretty long walk, so by the time we got back to Machu Picchu village, neither of us could be bothered climbing Machu Picchu mountain. We walked back down the hill to Aguas Calientes to save the $6 bus ride, and Kirsty (who was still not exactly feeling good!) was quicker than either of us. We were knackered at the bottom, pretty hungry, and couldn't get a daytime train that day (the 'adventurous' way I'd found to get there didn't really appeal by this stage, and the train ride is utterly stunning in the day), so we grabbed the train the next morning to Ollantaytambo and grabbed a collectivo from there - saving $22 compared to the standard train to Cusco and missing out the more boring bits of scenery (for some reason they only charge foreigners in dollars for the train).
Getting back to Cusco on the Wednesday at about lunch time meant I only had another 24h of wasteable time in Peru, so I played tabletennis in the hostel and had another night out - I thought it might be a plan since you barely have to pay for drinks as a gringo in Cusco, they just hand out loads of free vouchers to get you to go into their clubs! The next day, we realised Chris and I were on the same flight to Lima, so after more tabletennis we grabbed a taxi, and left each other there. About 10min later I met a pair of Irish girls who were on my flight to Quito, then an American who was on the same flight but staying on the plane while it waited to go to Cali, Colombia, and he told us about how lovely and unsafe Quito was, especially the Mariscal area where all the tourists stay (thanks Matthew!). He had been here for 3 months last year, and did give us a good tip for a hostel, so we went for the Magic Bean which gives the best free breakfasts of any hostel I know of.
Day one in Quito (Friday, because arriving at a hostel at 11 at night does not count as day 1!) I had a quick look at how to climb Cotopaxi, found a tour leaving the next day for $200 (turns out I paid $30 more than if I'd actually bothered to find the climbing place - Condor Trekk [woo!] - myself) with 4 people on it already, and decided that while I'd just been to all the high altitude places and there would be 3 guides (allowing lots of other people to drop out), this would be by far the best time to go! I hadn't really bothered checking whether going way down to Machu Picchu and Lima had wrecked my acclimatisation, so I went to the teleferico (goes to 4100m) and then stormed it up Rucu Pichincha (4698m). I facetiously said to a couple of Americans who were on their way down when I couldn't even see the top that I might see them on the way back down, (I must have been 35min from the top at fittest ever and best acclimatised Gav pace, and I'd only been walking about 75min, often not exactly the right way), and then I did indeed see them just before getting back to the teleferico! That made me decide I was ready for day 80, the start of the Cotopaxi tour (which was already paid for, and I was screwed if I'd decided otherwise)!
A Norwegian guy, Michael, joined up after me, which added to the 3 Swiss Germans (a married couple and a younger guy called Thomas) and an American girl, Lauren, who were already signed up. Michael and Thomas were both ridiculously sporty, and Thomas seemed to be even better acclimatised than me, so suddenly I wasn't feeling as if my 80 days of preparation was enough! When we got to the car park at the bottom of the mountain I got a little bored with the slow pace we were going up the mountain, so I kind of zoomed up to the refuge. The Swiss woman was struggling and made her husband carry her large rucksack, and we didn't see them at the glacier climbing practice bit, so I wasn't all that surprised when the guides decided to get them to leave a couple of hours before the rest of us in the morning. It was obviously early to bed after dinner that night (the other 4 of us were due to leave at 2, to let everyone else get out of the way for us preparing), but it was SO hard to sleep. It was really noisy in the massive dorm room with people coming in and out every so often with plastic boots on, what sounded like a party downstairs, and I was feeling slightly sick. If I'd been able to conk out I think I would have been fine, but after a couple of hours of lying awake I felt shit and ran for the door (through a maze of beds, down some stairs and then making sure I took the second right so that I didn't vomit in the kitchen). I made it to the door and absolutely not a step further before what may have been the biggest puke in my life, then Michael (who had seen me when coming back from the outhouse-toilet) decided to throw a couple of buckets of water on it to clean it up. He couldn't really sleep either, and fairly shortly after I got back to bed people started getting up and clumping about to climb the mountain. I reckon I got about 1-2h sleep in total all night, Michael reckons he had less than 5min, Thomas slept really badly too, and I'm assuming everyone else was the same. The older couple dropped out before starting and just went back to bed.
In the morning proper (i.e. 1am today, which seems like a lifetime ago now!), Thomas was down at breakfast and his head was really suffering from the altitude. He reckoned it was trying to sleep there that did it, because he hadn't actually slept any higher than Quito, just been for short 1 day climbs. Either way, he dropped out before we started, leaving 3 clients and 2 guides (1 stayed back to take people out for sunrise). Lauren went with one guide, with Michael and I together with the other. We left at 2.25am and all walked together to the bottom of the glacier (much higher than it was 3 years ago, about 5100m, a full hour into the hike!), and then we took a while getting crampons and ropes on and ice axes out. Lauren set off first, and it took us ages to catch up with her, maybe about another hour. We were all fairly close for the next hour or so as well, and then Michael and I just didn't slow down with the altitude while Lauren's leg was giving her gyp (which had been an issue the previous day too). At around 5.30 it started to get light, but we were on the wrong side of the mountain for sunrise - we got to see the towering shadow of Cotopaxi instead, and we kind of wondered how far up the shadow we were! Anyway, shortly after sunrise we got to the bottom of the hard bit, and kind of crapped ourselves. It's a really steep path on the glacier, and we could just see loads of people barely moving up it, if at all. We'd already passed loads of people who had given up, and it was still slightly too early for people to have summited (they would have stayed for sunrise), but still there were a bunch coming down looking exhausted. We went for it (we were only a couple of hundred metres short of the top, we couldn't give up there!), and kind of nailed it compared to everyone else, meaning that we passed a group who had set out 2h 30min before us! Oddly enough, ridiculous altitude, exhaustion, pace and a bit of illness made the last couple of hundred metres the hardest thing I've ever done, but we did eventually summit almost exactly 5h after leaving the hut (the guide was proud, and all the estimates I've seen say between 5 and 8 hours to get to the top). We also saw Lauren and her guide at the bottom of the really hard bit, then didn't see her later, so found out when we got to the bottom that her leg had been in agony, and the steepness of it was just not possible and she'd given up after trying a short section of it.
Anyway, back to the top. (Woo! 5897m!) Almost as soon as we summited (about 25th ish out of 60 or so attempts and 30 or so completions) we got to see an eruption on Sangay, claimed to be the most active volcano in the world (and Cotopaxi is apparently the highest active volcano... Ok, it's the highest one currently smoking, but it's still a lie! Not sure if the Sangay thing is really true). It's a 5230m volcano about 100-150km south of Cotopaxi, but still very visible above the few clouds and less clear bits that there were, and we got a great view of the cloud of ash it chucked up. Anyway, once we were done with that (obviously I'd had a little celebration in the minute or so before we noticed the eruption), Varsity Trip photo competition was the name of the day, and I'd been trying to come up with a good photo idea for ages. Yesterday when I saw the ice axe I just knew what it had to be - crawling out of the crater with the axe and crampons. I shoved the tshirt on over my fleece (the ski jacket had to come off, which was a bit chilly!) and slid down as far as I safely could towards the beautifully smoking crater, then put on a compulsory silly face. When you've been trying to come up with a photo idea for ages, and you don't know either the prize or the closing date, it does kind of feel good when you've taken the best one you think you can.
Unfortunately I found out the prize and closing date a couple of hours ago. I can't be arsed with the prize (tickets to Freeze Festival at Battersea Power Station, for 3 days with crap bands in the middle of a term when I'm going to be very busy), and I need to get them my photo by Tuesday, but I feel I've tried so hard that I can't give up now! Let's see if I can find a Kodak photo shop tomorrow, otherwise I'm screwed.
Anyway, I might try to get to a football match tomorrow (an actually cultural experience considering I've done nothing but gringo trail for the past couple of weeks!), and Michael was kind of tempted to climb Sangay, and I kind of want to see lava, so we might do that at some point soon. Not sure about the safety of it, it usually erupts in the same direction apparently (about every 10min), but I'll have a look, see if I've got time, and maybe give it a shot!
