Sometimes it doesn't help that I don't have too much free time. Of course, work is part of the issue. I wake up go to work, get home do my Mandarin homework, go to class and come back at night a bit tired and then I busy myself with random things like chatting with friends, reading the news, eating, talking to my parents, etc. If I could I would multiply my hours so that apart from all that I could paint, write, sew and do all sorts of projects that I have in my mind. But then the good thing about being busy is that I don't have too much time to get bored.
However, I wish I had written this post earlier in the week when my thoughts were still fresh. Now I can't even remember what I wanted to say about the weekend.
Last weekend I attempted to climb up my second mountain; this time the Chiles Volcano in the frontier with Colombia. Since this mountain is a bit far from Quito we left on saturday morning towards the north of the country. That day we went just a little bit past a small town called El Angel, which is in the andean paramo. We stayed at the Hosteria Polylepis and it was beautiful. If you don't know what the paramo is like well let me describe it. Its usually very cold and high up in the mountains, but you can only find it between the tropics. Its very humid and it rains a lot all year long. There are different types of paramos and the one we went to is famous for its frailejones. Frailejones are a whole family of plants that grow only in Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador. They look like a bunch of fuzzy bunny ears stuck together, and where we went there were tons of these plants everywhere.
That first night at the Hosteria Polylepis we went out for a walk to a nearby waterfall. It was a short muddy walk, but absolutely beautiful. Luckily the place we stayed at rents rubber boots, if not our mountain shoes would have been completely wet the next day and I can't imagine it being fun to climb up a mountain with wet shoes.
After our walk we had trout for dinner and then we went on a night walk with torches before going to sleep. On sunday we woke up around 4:30 am because we still had more or less 2 hours of road to get to the volcano. We might have gotten a bit lost, and the road might have been a bit longer than we expected, but in the end we got to the Chiles and started climbing at 10am.
The climb was a lot easier than the one at the Pasochoa, however we were a bit higher up in altitude. The Pasochoa's peak is at 4199mt above sea level and for the Chiles we started climbing at 4100mt because the highest peak reaches 4720mt.
The hike up started up pretty easily, we went through the pajonal and the frailejones. Then the scenery changed and it was a very wet floor with a thick type of grass...I really don't know how to describe it. Either way it didn't last too long, after a couple of minutes the rocks starting appearing until in the end it was all rock.
Now I know rocks don't seem too scary, but they are, at least to me they are. The climb did get pretty steep at times and the problem with these rocks was that they weren't really set into the mountain, so they kept on falling apart or rolling away and so it was a bit tense most of the time. However I enjoyed it, maybe its masochism...or who knows what because there were a couple of moments when I was pretty scared. But maybe that's just me being silly.
I think I climbed up to 4700 meters...only to the bottom of the second highest peak, and that was it. I chickened out. The truth is the final part of the path, the part that went to the highest peak, looked pretty scary. It was raining and slippery and well I am scared of rocks and heights.
But it was still a very enjoyable climb, and I don't feel bad about not making it to the top. I still got the same rush the next day where all I wanted to do was climb another mountain. So that's what I plan to do, in two days I will be climbing the Imbabura!!!
