Day 82 was very much a day off, looking at other volcanoes to climb before going to the football. I realised Sangay was too remote (it's a minimum of a 5 day trek, and I didn't have time), but decided I fancied climbing Chimborazo instead - it's the point furthest from the centre of the Earth and the highest point in Ecuador or anywhere in the Americas north of it. Couldn't get anything booked up immediately, and went off to the football that evening with Michael and Thomas from the Cotopaxi hike. We were watching La Liga (the team from Quito that won their version of the UEFA Cup then the Super Cup to be crowned South American champions the Wednesday previously) against Universidad Catholica, also from Quito. La Liga won 1-0, and the atmosphere wasn't exactly what we were hoping for because La Liga weren't really as interested as they should have been, but it was still my first match in about 10 years and it was a good bit of fun. Michael and I also decided we wanted to do some more climbing, and Guagua Pichincha sounded good when Thomas' Spanish teacher told us where to go from. Later that night Michael said his wife wasn't keen on him doing more climbing that week because she wanted to actually see him, so I thought I'd bum about and hang around at the top of Rucu again or something for acclimatisation before booking Chimbo.
The next morning Michael called, his wife had got him out of bed early and told him he could still go climbing up Guagua (pronouned 'wah wah', Quichua/Quechua for baby - it erupted and covered Quito in ash in 1999), but not Chimborazo. We met up at around 10, got to a village called Lloa a bit before midday and started walking. It didn't look too far, and the guy who'd told us the route said it was 4h up, so we were kind of surprised when 3h later we were only just leaving the road and it did take us almost 4h to get to the top. It was cloudy, a bit cold, and yet again I was in shorts (but I had prepared this time and brought a jumper!). I also found out Michael rowed in the Olympics for Norway in Seoul 1988 and has a world championships medal to boot. No pressure on me then... However, we eventually made it, both pretty tired, to what we thought was the top, but to be honest there's a ridge along the edge of the crater, and we could only ever see one other peak (which looked a tiny bit lower, but not much). It does now seem (from Google Earth) that we did get to the proper summit at 4784m, and it also seems like the walk was a LOT further than planned. We'd thought it was maybe 1000m or so of vertical to the summit from Lloa, but it turns out it was more like 1750m, and the horizontal distance looks like it's about 14km each way (although we hitched for the last 5-6km). Still, not quite the simple little acclimatisation wander about that I'd been hoping for.
That night I got back to La Mariscal (dodgy area of Quito where all the hostels and tour agencies are) and managed to book up my Chimborazo tour for $40 less than expected (but still $310, and I was the only client). It was booked for the Thurs/Fri, with the plan being to meet Payal and Tony from Kenya in Guayaquil for a beach trip immediately after. This left the Wednesday free, so I took the agency up on their offer of a $5 hostal a bit further south and closer to the volcano, which was also at a slightly higher altitude of about 3200m - all the better for acclimatisation! I did have to grab a bus at 7 the next morning though, meaning no going out and meeting up with Marie (French Belgian who slept on our couch after my first 1 day trek in Sucre!).
Day 84 came, and I got to the cheap (and half price) hostel where I'd paid for a shared 2 person dorm and got a double bed, before realising I had absolutely nothing to do, so I joined up with a cycling tour for Cotopaxi about two or three minutes before the bus left (the hostel was owned by the tour company, and that's where they keep the bikes). This meant going to Cotopaxi for the third time in my life, climbing up to the refuge again, having a look at the glacier, walking back down to the car park and then cycling down from there (4500m) to Lago Limpiopungo (3800m), all for $35 plus another 10 for park entry. Having paid for this, I realised it would be a bit dull compared to death road, so when we got to the car park I asked if I could cycle down from the refuge instead. I was wearing shorts, and there was a bit of a blizzard going on, but thankfully an English guy leant me some waterproof trousers to keep me warm. The guide said if I could get the bike up there, we could cycle down, so I grabbed one, stuck it on my shoulders, and started hiking while everyone else (about 12-15 tourists) decided I was utterly insane.
After getting to the refuge (not last, despite the bike), the guide who was taking the group to the glacier asked me to be an auxiliary guide for him and tell him if people were having problems or whatever because I'd just climbed the mountain and was finding the altitude really easy, so I ended up half-carrying an English girl up to the glacier, and then when she started suffering from the altitude up there I pretty much carried her down with the help of an Israeli girl (ok, so her feet were on the ground, but I was supporting a very significant proportion of her weight the vast majority of the time! Thankfully she was only wee). We got back to the refuge, had some food, then the stupid part came around - cycling down. Luckily all the snow and ice (which normally isn't there) meant that the volcanic ash path was a little harder than normal and less dangerous for a bike, but it also meant a lot of the large rocks were less visible. I tried to go all the way from the top on the bike but it was just too steep at the very top (over 30°, maybe even approaching 40°) and I couldn't control the bike or sit far enough back to let me use the front brakes reliably without immediately pitching forward and risking a roll over the handlebars. I walked down about 20-30m vertically to a slightly flatter bit, then went very very slowly from there. Needless to say, when doing something so stupid and not being great on a bike (the guide who also brought a bike just went at a decent speed with his back wheel locked the whole way), I did fall over. I got to just in front of a rock I hadn't seen, tried to turn the wheel to get out of its way, then the front wheel dug in and the whole bike went straight over it, dumping me (after falling off in the air and being catapulted from the bike) on my back onto the nice soft ash. Having realised there was absolutely no damage to me I just burst out laughing, got back on, and got down to the car park after most of the people who had just walked it. Some people decided cycling down the road was too dangerous for them (ahem...), and got back on the bus, but about 6-8 other people got bikes and started cycling down. I got to the front reasonably quickly with my recent death road experience making me quite up for a stupidly fast downhill cycle ride when the surface is relatively safe, and when I got to the end of the proper downhill bit I stopped to see who was behind me. After about 10-15s the guide caught me up, then we waited for AGES to see who else was there. That took over 10min. Apparently they'd been stopping for photos too much (I already had better ones than I could get on an overcast, snowy day) and one guy had waved for the camera just before a pretty dramatic crash. Still, people eventually caught up, we got to the lake, put the bikes back on the car and I finally realised that my bike was a good couple of kilograms heavier than anyone else's. Gracias Señor Guia!
Back to the hostel, I grabbed a jacuzzi and ate as much as I could to stock up for Chimborazo. The next day I met my guide, Jaime, and we picked his mate up from Latacunga and I found out I was going to kind of have a second guide for free! Alex used to guide in Ecuador, then got married to a half-Scottish girl (whose dad speaks Doric) and now lives in Australia, and did a bit of guiding there. Anyway, I could chat to him in English, which I thought might be kind of handy in my more tired moments. We didn't bother with any more glacier training, so it was really just a rest/eat day before getting up at 10pm to go climbing, from the lower of the two huts (4800m) because the wind was making the higher one a bit more dangerous - rocks fall when the mountain warms up during the day or when it's windy, so we'd take a route along a ridge to avoid them more.
We got up, and finally left the hut about 20min late at around 11:20pm. Before we even reached the ridge, Alex said he was struggling with altitude, and when his watch with the altimeter said he'd reached 5000m he gave up. I'm pretty glad he was willing to go back on his own (and that he was ok when we got back down in the morning!), because otherwise I would have made him pay for my whole climbing trip since I had paid to have a private tour! Anyway, Jaime and I carried on, and it seemed to be taking a shockingly long time to reach the glacier. I wasn't sure if this was just us moving slowly, or if the glacier was much higher than I'd expected, but it now seems to be a combination of both (I don't think we got to constant snow until about 5500m, and Google Earth seems to confirm this). A lot of this distance was using crampons because there was a little bit of ice around, and using crampons on a mainly rocky surface is not easy! It basically means you don't really know which way your foot will want to fall because you don't know if one spike is going to hit a raised bit of rock or fall through the gaps. Anyway, after a lot of bits where it was 'one slip and we die if the person at the other end of the rope gets dragged with you', we finally got up to the glacier proper. There were loads of bits of very slow walking (I think I might have been physically tired before starting, and I knew all too well that I couldn't do a Cotopaxi pace the whole way up!) but then I'd get a third or fourth wind and have a good thirty minutes to an hour. While one of these was happening (4-4:45am) on the glacier, I was feeling great until I made a wee mistake... I dropped my ice axe because my mittens (which were on over the top of my ski gloves) didn't let me grip the axe well, and it slid a LONG way down the glacier, way out of sight and the range of the head torches. After a few minutes of discussing what to do (could we even keep going? I was probably tired enough by this point to actually cry if we couldn't) we decided I'd take Jaime's second ice axe, which was his own personal equipment, but we'd tie it to me and if I lost it he'd kill me. We kept going, and the great energy I'd had for the previous 45min was gone, so it was slow.
All the way up from then on was hard. From around 6000m onwards I was really feeling the altitude, and every 10-20 steps I would have to stop, bend over on my ice axe and just pant for a bit. My eyes closed every time, and to be honest I probably got a few seconds of sleep each time (to make up for the little over 2h I got in the refuge I guess), but Jaime just shouted 'vamos' at me and I opened my eyes (somehow) and started walking again. He also shouted 'bajamos' (let's go down) at me a few times, but I kept saying no and kept walking because it looked like we were near the top. Most of the glacier is just a walk up a 30-45° incline in not especially hard snow, and if you venture off the not-very-beaten path you sink in up to your knee, or if your ice axe unexpectedly sinks in to the handle you fall over. Or if the guide yanks on the rope you might fall over. Or if the wind catches you (it was VERY strong, and coming straight from the summit!) you might fall over. Or you might just hit a patch of snow that's so loose that your crampons slip and you fall over. Guess what happened to me somewhere between 50-100 times on the hike! Anyway, the top of the first summit is nicely rounded, so for about the last 1-2h it looked like I was only 50-100m from the top. We probably passed 6000m around dawn, and finally reached the first summit at maybe around 7:45am. I was in a bad way but still remembered to get a photo (before the camera battery died from the cold) of me looking freezing, clutching an ice axe but managing to stand. I then sat down, ate chocolate and discovered ALL of my water was frozen and inaccessible. I didn't even remember to have a proper look round other than at the other summit (a view that will haunt me until I get there), and that was just because the guide pointed it out and said we couldn't go there because it was too late and big rocks would start falling on us on the way down. I was pretty glad of this, because it looked like it was about a kilometre away (on relatively flat ground), and at that altitude (the full summit is either 6310m according to Ecuadorians, or 6268m according to Wikipedia, and Jaime said we were about 42m lower than the main summit with about a 50m drop between them) and my ridiculous level of exhaustion and coldness I really didn't think I could do it. So we headed back down, with me having made it to a summit well over 6000m and thinking if I didn't have a guide with me I would have already fallen asleep and died of exposure.
The way down was quite a lot quicker than the way up, mainly because it was so steep. Cotopaxi and many other mountains where most of the route is a fairly shallow gradient (like Guagua) take about half as much time to get down as they do to get up, so I was kind of surprised to be finishing up the glacier bit after only about an hour. We also had a very happy moment when we spotted my ice axe! Jaime saw it first, and that saved me $120 in replacement fees. This led to me telling him in Riobamba later that if he found me a cash machine he'd get a decent tip. Anyway, we were racing down the mountain to try to avoid the sun getting onto the rocky bit and making the bigger rocks heat up and break off, but I was still knackered so I was trying to stop as often as possible (which usually meant somewhere behind a big drop so that rocks would fly straight over us). At one point, still pretty much on the ridge, I decided to try my water again, and found that squeezing the bottle really hard made the ice at the top explode out! A big ice cube landed about 5m from me after a surprisingly long time in the air, and I could drink again! It woke me up a bit, but I still had very little energy. On the rocky bit you just saw rocks rolling down at scary speeds (probably 20-30mph), and we had to run between ridges and frozen waterfalls a number of times, with crampons still on and loose rocks making me fall over even more. The adrenaline was exhausting, and it was pretty damn scary, but eventually we made it down to the top refuge (5000m). I sat down to take my harness off, started talking to some Ecuadorians and just stayed for ages while Jaime went on down to the bottom. Eventually I got myself back up and walked on after maybe 20-30min, so by the time I got back to the refuge at the bottom I'd been on the mountain for a full 12h. I just sat down and finished my chocolate, then lay back in the shade with no possibility of me getting up for quite a while. Jaime and Alex started joking about what I'd been like at the top, and I was just happy that I'd made it up and down, and not killed myself doing it! I went into the refuge for the passport stamp, and the guy was impressed enough that I'd made it to a summit that he gave me the full summit stamp too. The other group that was climbing that day turned back, but I've got no idea when because they'd left the refuge by the time we got down there.
Anyway, the Friday afternoon was a basic affair of driving to Riobamba, giving Jaime a tip and jumping on a bus to Guayaquil to meet Payal and Tony! They were pretty amazed to see me again after Kenya, since they'd buggered off to Ecuador, but we grabbed a couple of beers and had a tasty BBQ. The next day we got up at 5, left at 6 and got their mate Tony (from Florida, world rodeo champion 1972, just imagine the southern accent!) to drive us to the beach at Ayampe. Beers were opened at 8am, and when we got there an hour or so later we found out Nienke (met her in Sucre) was already there, although the last I'd said to her we were expecting to arrive in the late afternoon because I wasn't expecting to get to Guayaquil so quickly. Anyway, there was more morning beer, a lunch in Puerto Lopez (a neighbouring beach) with a coconut I found on a tree and opened with a knife, back to Ayampe for an afternoon siesta and then out to Montañita that evening for a bit of a party. I was pretty much too tired to dance for a change. The next day we hung about on Ayampe until check out before going to another beach for the afternoon, and there was a little bit more sun than I thought there was. Still, it was great to get a properly relaxing weekend after 8 days of volcano climbing, and I did manage to get from somewhere over 6200m to under the sea in less than 36h!
The next morning was day 93, and time to leave. Nienke was getting a train to Sibambe for the Devil's Nose train ride so because the bus station and airport are right beside each other she came along to keep me company until I went through security. The airport tax was a little more than I'd been told it was, so I didn't have enough money for a coffee, meaning I now owe her a beer next time I see her! Anyway, got the flight to Miami ok without a single cent left, when I got there it was pouring so I couldn't go to the beach and I had an argument with someone in a Pizza Hut about prices not including taxes. Having got up early it was probably about time to sleep when I got on the BA flight to London, but I stayed awake with the films and just waited til I could get some nice cheese back home. And I did, for the first time in over 3 months. :)
Since I arrived back in Britain, I've moved into the new house in Oxford, slept loads, ate even more and still not got over my ridiculous appetite, so I'm thinking I'll head to the doctor to see if it's something to worry about (I've got a medic telling me I must have absorption issues or something to be able to eat so much). Ecuador also flared up massively on day 99, with its neighbours closing its borders after the police force nearly killed the president with tear gas then blockaded him into his hospital (they were pissed off about austerity measures meaning their benefits were reduced). The army got him out by shooting at the police after 10h of what he called kidnap, and he said the whole thing amounted to an attempted coup. The police and bits of the armed forces blocked most major roads and closed the international airports, meaning Angela possibly wasn't able to get to New Zealand on time and may well have had to wait for an extra 17 days. It's probably a good thing I got out when I did, there were reports of massively increased mugging and looting rates.
And I've been telling everyone Ecuador was safe...
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