Tramping it up

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Trying to think of new creative words that don´t repeat myself but basically still cover amazing, awesome etc etc. Todays word then is superific! What a superfantasticico hiking day I have had again. Almost can´t handle the consistent pace of happiness and hiking fatigue buzz. No I think I can.

I have two new hard core hiking buddies, Calvin from NZ and Andrew from Brisvegas. We ditched the group today as we are all really keen to walk whenever possible. Thought it might be our first and last chance to really break away so we consulted the travel bible at breakfast and went for the most difficult thing we could fit in a day. They are both over ten years younger than me and gung ho so was a bit worried if I could keep up. But no problem thank god.

We took a local bus two hours North West almost to the Columbian border. Small town called Otavalo. All the people there are sweet, traditionally dressed Indians. Beautiful little short folk, colourful and selling all kinds of outrageously dyed fabrics, fruits, meats and suss things that we didn´t try.

Both guys have been studying Spanish for the last month in Quito so we agreed to try as much as possible to only speak Spanish today, very fun! Anyway we hired a taxi to take us up a 17km long dirt road from Otavalo up a steep incline to the start of our hike.

The hike is basically around a massive lake sitting in the core of an extinct volcano. A Caldera is what is left when a volcano erupts and blows it´s top off. This creates a circle of massive steep mountains with a hole in the middle. Over time the crater fills up with water and created Lagunas de Majonda or Lake Majonda. Incredible to just look at. Our mission was to walk around the whole thing creating our own path by tramping, hacking and wading in the wet bits.

I officially morphed into a dirty, messy boy today and had so much fun. We walked hard for over 4 hours through slushy lake edged moss, pampas grass, smelly liquid muddy forests and up and down really steep mounds to see how we could possible get around the lake as we went. We all got covered in scratches and probably should have had some cutting implement like a machete. After our feet got covered in mud and our socks socked we started freaking each other out by imagining what parasites and weirdo massive bugs possibly live in the lake and may cause us to lose toes😊. Ginormous bees and buzzy things inspired this conversation.

It was invigorating, high altitude again, and very rewarding working out our own trail through some really hard core dense areas. Must say I was a bit worried we would make it back in time. Also we were the only people in this remote area and had made our taxi driver promise to return up the rocky road to come and get us at a time we roughly guessed it would take us to get around the lake. Anyway we made it all ok, taxi driver didn´t return to rob us or anything sinister😊

We poured ourselves back into the public bus back to the City, but the return journey took us through tiny villages and therefore a 4 hour trip to come home. All the way back we were bombarded with Western crap, first a really old Sylvester Stallone movie called Cobra with Spanish voice over dubbing. Fucking hilarious. Sly actually seems more intelligent with a Spanish accent. Once that ended they played REALLY loud eighties music and because of my era I was the only one who knew all the words so just really HAD to sing along to some terrible Flashdance tunes. The standing crowd of people holding chickens and corn baskets thought I was a freak. Very funny.

Off early tomorrow to Amazon, will take all day to get there on dodgy group bus. Already the group has voted against public transport in favour of paying more for dressed up Gringo coach. Bit worrying. All we need is name tags now and it´s offically the soft travelling I feared! Just kidding, not that drastic I´m sure. We´ll be swimming in hot springs, doing some jungle trekky thing and then heading to a place called Banos which is meant to be like the Queenstown of Ecuador where you can white water raft, ride quad bikes, cycle, hike and party. Will prob be in touch from there.....

Kris
xxx

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