Monday, August 18

We went for gold, but got only a silver medal. Which sport? Climbing the Cotopaxi vulcano with the summit at 5895 meters.
We had thought of climbing Cotopaxi for a long time but decided in the end that it was too much for us. With the strong winds this time of year and the guidebooks saying it's only for experienced mountain climbers, we thought ourselves not capable of doing it. We thought about mountain biking or doing some horseback riding in the area around the vulcano. Until we met some French ladies when we were staying in a beautiful 400-year old hacienda near Quito. They were not experienced climbers either, but were going to try to reach the summit. That's when we decided to give it a try as well, who knows when you get another chance? We prepared and acclimatised ourselves by going to the beautiful area of the Quilotoa crater and hiking uphill for a whole day, up to 3900 meters and sleeping at 3800 meters. The views were beautiful and inside the crater is a very pretty emerald coloured lake.

Two days later we started our trip to the summit. We went by car until the refuge at 4800 meters. There we practised with our guide how to walk with crampons under our shoes and how to use an ice axe. It went very well; we didn't have any trouble with the altitude, where in Nepal we were already feeling bad at 4200 meters.
The night was short and noisy, with almost 60 other climbers sleeping in the same room. At 24.00 o'clock we woke up to start walking at 01.00 in the morning, tied to each other and our guide with a rope (during the day the snow gets too soft and creates risks of avalanches). The weather was reasonable, but got worse when we got higher: strong winds and a lot of snow. Soon we also discovered that even though we didn't have headaches (a sign of altitude sickness), it was very tough breathing at this altitude and our physical conditions were not the best. We progressed very slowly, ploughing through the snow and stopping to catch our breath a lot of times. At 06.00 o'clock the weather had turned really bad and physically we also weren't able to go any further so we decided to turn around. We had gotten to 5500 meters, just as high as in Nepal.

To our knowledge, no other group made it to the top that day because of the weather and several people had to turn around a long time before us. So we're not too disappointed in ourselves ;-). It would have been great if we had reached the summit, but it was a great experience to climb on a mountain and glacier in the dark and to learn how to use crampons and ice axes.

But that's not all that we did in Ecuador besides the Galapagos. Before that, we went to the coast, to Puerto Lopez. There we went whale watching and saw some large groups of humpback whales, beautiful.
After Cotopaxi, we were dead and we went to Baños to revive ourselves. Baños means "baths" and they have thermal baths with water coming from the volcano behind the town. Marloes also went to the sauna and had a massage and facial treatment, while Jeroen relaxed on the balcony of our nice hostal. That was good relaxing! Baños was the last stop on our trip through Ecuador, we flew to Panama 2 days later.