Advertisement
Published: August 6th 2006
Edit Blog Post
Hola
Well we made an attempt to climb Cotopaxi - the world's highest active volcano. It is 5897m high. We arrived at the refuge the day before and we just chilled out (literally). Then we went to bed at about 7pm because everyone is woken up at midnight for breakfast. The climbing starts at 1am.
It was too hard to sleep - a mixture of the altitude and the cold! So you are pretty knackered when you start out. We'd gone through an agency in Quito and they were useless. They provide you with all the kit and they forgot a couple of things we needed. Our guide luckily found some windpants for us.
It is pitch black and the climb starts pretty steep. The sky was amazing... so many stars and you could see Quito in the distance (its about 2 hours from Quito to Cotopaxi National Park).
We had to put crampons on when we reached the glacier! So I've finally stood on a glacier - one of my lifelong ambitions - a bit odd I know... but ahh it was amazing. Walking with crampons was bloomin hard.
Then our headlamps failed... so it was only our guide's lamp that was working. We kept going but we were much slower. It was ever so hard walking when you couldn't see. We kept going for as long as we could... then our guide said that we were too slow and we wouldn't make the summit in time. This kind of killed our motivation so we ended up stopping at 5,400m. Bit gutted that we didn't make it!!!!
Atacames - the beach!! We were invited to go on a trip to the beach with the children from our volunteer project. About 40 kids went on the trip (ranging from 6 - 17 years old). The bus that had been hired was a standard city bus (hard seats with low backs) with room for 35 people sitting down. So there were little children lying on mattresses in the corridor. We left at 10.30pm and it took 8 hours... didn't get much sleep!!!
The scenery started to change after we left the mountains - there were loads of banana plantations and it became much more tropical. We arrived in Atacames at 6am.... the children and the organisers stayed in a house (2 kids per bed - so 8 per room). Cam, Sara (the other volunteer) and I kindly offered (no, insisted) to stay elsewhere so there was more room for the kids!!! We were only a couple of doors down and were on the beachfront aswell.
Well we played in the waves with the kids - quite a number of them had never seen the sea before!! It was great fun! The waves were quite good too (for me). Generally the kids went out to the sea unattended. We watched them a lot but they were up and out at 6am every morning!
We ate rice and potatoes for lunch - simple and filling!! It wasn't easy for Conchita to cook for 50 people on one gas stove!!
There were no major disasters - we had one sick child who I ended up having to look after as he was throwing up. Poor mite - I think he was suffering from sun/heat stroke. One of the kids kept asking me if I was a doctor in my own country! All I did was give the child a paracetamol and put him to bed and told everyone to leave him alone to sleep!
We played night football on the sand on the last night and we then left at 2pm for the 8 hour bus ride back to Quito - which was just splendid fun! As the kids were awake there was a great deal of swinging from the overhead bars, clambering around and even some ball throwing. A very safe journey!
One sad thing is the littering you see here - from the children and the adults. The children generally just threw their rubbish down on the beach - so when we saw it we made them take it to the bin. The worst was when the bus drivers wife changed her babies nappy on the bus and then
threw it out of the window!!!!! We were quite horrified!
Anyways - sorry for the lack of pictures on this entry... hope you don´t get too bored... we took disposable cameras to the mountain and the beach, so we´ll update this when we can with piccies!!!
Love
Lucy & Cam
Advertisement
Tot: 0.127s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 13; qc: 76; dbt: 0.0869s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb