June 3: Ruca Pichincha

I'm sitting at a McDonalds in the mall near our apartment. That high school Spanish classic "Bailamos" is thumping in the speakers. But I was not here all day. Today, I climbed a volcano.

Yes, Neil and I actually climbed Ruca Pichincha, one of the two Pichincha peaks outside of Quito. It used to be one big volcano, but a eruption eons ago blew it into two peaks. Ruca's summit is at 15, 130 ft. Honestly, it was one of the most physically challenging things I've ever done. I got the hang of hiking up some steep hillsides, just take it slow and take breaks. We joined up with an English-speaking Swiss doing volunteer work in Ecuador. He was in the Swiss Army and later powered on up the mountain past us, but he was an enjoyable fellow while he hung around. I was pretty soon on the mountain-proper. After traversing some creeks, rocky spots and so on, we came to the sandy slopes. The sandy slopes are the "easy" way up (the hard way being climbing up the rocks, which for which you would need climbing gear). Imagine this: a beach, with soft, loose sand, on a 50-60 degree incline. With each step, I'd advance about half a step at best because my feet sunk back into the sand. Also, I was close to 15,000 ft. Catching my breath there was not a matter of going for 5-10 minutes, then taking a 30 second breather. No. I would count 30 steps, then try to suck in as much oxygen as possible while taking a break. Finally we got out of the pure sand, and traded that for a mixture or rocky outcroppings, sand, and a little ice. That was really no eaiser. We did finally reach the summit though. The picture of me sitting in the clouds shows that. Getting back down was not nearly as exhausting, but my backside sure took a toll as we basically had to slide on our butts out of some of the rock. The sand was much more fun going down. It was kinda like skiiing in hiking boots. We finally got back to Quito, and I've really never been so throughly exhausted. Having hardly had much of an appetite for food all day, Neil and I easily polished off super size pizza this evening.

I'm not sure when I'll be writing again. Tomorrow we venture to Latacunga, Ecuador for two weeks to work with FODEMI. According to our guidebook, "After 2-3 hours of walking around Latacunga, there really isn't much else to do there." I guess besides our work we'll be watching a lot of movies, and doing a lot of running to try to acclimatize. When we came down Ruca, we could see 19,347 ft. Cotopaxi looming about 50 km south.