New Heights?

I know the name of the maid! Mercedes. I'd heard Pilar say it before, but assumed she was talking about the car. I feel a lot better knowing the name of the person I spend every breakfast and dinner time chatting to. And chat we do. She still speaks too fast for me to understand everything, but it's much better, and I can talk to her back. I tell her all the stories from the school, and what I get up to, and we can even have a joke! Pilar, Belen and Alvaro (the cool son whose name I didn't know before either) seem quite impressed by my Spanish, but then going to anything from nothing is definitely progress.

I had SUCH a good weekend. Friday night out in "Gringolandia" was so much fun. We started off in a bar with loads of pool, ping-pong and table football tables. The music was a bit too English/American, but pool was great. I potted the black to bring victory for our team and beat a couple of guys, of which I was quite proud. Then we moved on to another, less game-based bar, and did a bit of dancing. After a mojito (at $2) or two, dancing was easy! And one of the guys from the school, Oliver, showed me a few moves. It was fun chatting to the other students and a few locals, and generally letting my hair down. Amazing how drunk you can get at this altitude though, I was seeing double by the end of the night. Though fortunately I think I managed to avoid standing on too many toes, so all was good!

The next day, slightly hungover, Marilyn (from Sweden), Sam (from New England), Aldis (from Iceland) and I went to the Mitad del Mundo. We got a few photos posing in front of the equator monument and the official line, had a traditional Ecuadorian lunch (minus the roasted whole guinea pig, thankfully), and browsed the touristy tiendas. I really wish I'd bought the llama finger-puppet! We were persuaded by a guy in the car park to take a trip to a nearby volcano caldera (impressed Tash?) for a bit of a hike. Sadly it was too cloudy up there to see much except a few metres of the path ahead, but it was really cool - more cloud-forest type scenery. The guide showed us various medicinal plants and persuaded us to try them. We sampled anis, rosemary, mint, some wierd plant that is supposed to help with period pain, and some hallucinogenic berries. It takes 40 to have hallucinations, we only had 1 each. Probably a good idea since the path was quite narrow and the drop quite steep!

On Sunday, having recovered from my hangover (but not from being continually teased about it by Mercedes), Marilyn and I took the Teleferico (a new cable car) a good way up the volcano that looms to the west of Quito, called Pichincha. From a height of 4,100m (at the top of the cable car), we hiked to the top of one of it's summits, at about 4,700m. It doesn't sound much, but it was so tiring at that altitude! It took us about 3 hours to get up to the top, and the terrain was really tricky at times. I got scared! The paths were narrow and the drops so sheer. At times we were scrambling up scree slopes and traversing almost vertical walls of rock. I don't know whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that clouds obscured the views at times. It definitely didn't help me to know that some mountaineer died up there last Saturday, which we found out half way up! Maybe because of that, there were various arrows and "NO"s graffiti-ed on the path suggesting that it wasn't the best idea to take this route, but everyone else was... And we made it down okay! The views were spectacular. Not only were the mountains we were amongst dramatic, but we could see Quito sprawled out in front of us, and in the distance the perfectly cone-shaped, classically snow-capped volcano of Cotopaxi rising out of the clouds.

I'm still not sure whether it's a great idea, but Marilyn and I are joining a group that Oliver is getting together to attempt Cotopaxi this coming weekend. He suggested it on Friday night, and maybe I wasn't in the best condition to consider the idea rationally. But he's a rock climber - in fact he teaches it - and he's spoken to a good company about getting a guide and seems to know what he's doing. At least, I thought so, until yesterday, when I heard what happened at the weekend. He and two of the other students, Matthew (from the US, like Oliver), and Maria (Danish, like everyone else), hired a car to visit Columbia for the weekend. I think all they really wanted was a Colombian passport stamp. Oliver invited me to come, and I would have been tempted had I not made other plans. Anyway, they got stopped by the Ecuadorean police on the way and searched. Incredibly stupidly, Oliver had marijuana with him. The whole group were interrogated individually, in Spanish, and Oliver ended up forking out a bribe of over $700 to let them go. They made it on to Columbia and back without a hiccup. But Oliver has not been his usual cheerful self since! He claimed he was going to use or get rid of it all before they attempted to cross the border, but even then there'd have been a detectable residue, surely. It makes an interesting travel story (which kept my host family entertained), but a very expensive one for Oliver. Glad I wasn't persuaded to go. Well, kind of...

Nevertheless, I put my name down for the Cotopaxi trip today. I'm hearing various reports. One guy at the school did it last weekend, and says it was the hardest thing he's ever done. But he made it. My host family think I'm crazy, since I have no experience of ice or snow climbing. It's true, crampons and other gear is required, but the company provides all the specialist stuff. It's expensive relative to other things I could do at the weekend, but at $140 it's a bargain, and I'm not going to get an opportunity like this again. I didn't quite make it to the top of Kilimanjaro, but I coped alright with what I did do, so I'm determined that I can do this one. Okay I'm not great with heights, but I hear it's a relatively gradual climb, and we're trussed up to one another. Plus it'll be nighttime or snowing, so I won't see the drops! I've spent nearly 2 weeks at nearly 3000m in Quito, including some running, plus I did an acclimatisation climb on Sunday. We're a group of 7, and most of them have as little or less experience than me. So I'm going to go for it. We leave at 8am on Friday (so I have to rearrange my lessons) and should get back on Sunday evening. I'm scared!