volcanoe El Misti

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arrived in arequipa three days ago and got in on a guided excursion up volcano el misti which is 5822 meters high. on the trip were two guys from britain, one form poland, me and the guide was local...he said he´d been up this volcano over 200 times. music was the backdrop for this trip because the guide had a portable radio which he kept on literally the enire time and the station played only U.S. music from the eighties. it actually became a nightmarish scenario and the trip participants argued about who could be last in the lineup so as to be as far from the music as possible. at one point, phil (british) asked angel (the guide) to turn on the radio for just five minutes and angel responded ¨no problem¨ then when six minutes had passed he promptly turned it back on.
So in spite of the tunes, it was an excellent excursion... we ascended nearly 8,000 feet to the top of the crater at 18,500 feet. no glacier to deal with so it was pretty straight forward. I got a touch of altitude sickness and was given some pills i can´t recall the name of but they whipped me right into shape for the climb. the descent was fantastic as we slid/skiied down about 4,000 feet in scree (loose gravel/sand) then descended the rest in typical hiking fashion.
tomorrow i will be going on a guided trip up volcano chachani

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Photos

El Misti Crater
there were actully two craters and this one had sulphurous steam/smell being emitted

four of us on trek
this on the first day, heading to basecamp

descending 4,000 feet in half hour
this was really fun going down what had taken over 6 hours to ascend

here,s the top
there was a huge iron cross on top