From Quito to Santiago

From Quito I had less than two weeks to get down to Santiago in Chile to meet Mum at the airport, a distance of over 5000km. Figuiring that I'd cover the stretch between Lima in Peru and Santiago in one big go of three days I now had a bit of free time to check out a few places along the way.

First stop was Banos a few hours bus ride away to meet back up with Sarah and Natalie from the hostel in Quito and to do some biking in the lush green valleys around town. We stayed in another great hostel called plantas y blanco (plants and white, it was white and there were a lot of plants) with a nice rooftop terrace and bar setup and great breakfasts of gourmetish breads and jams.

Day one the weather was pretty awful so we spent our time just wandering around the pretty town buying supposedly local handicrafts (I saw exactly the same alpaca jumper I bought in a patagonian souvenir shop, 7000km away) and stopping off in the market to sample some BBQ cuy, or as they're known in Australia, guinea pig. These ones were actually pretty big (about the size of a medium cat) but despite their size had very little meat on them, and what there was was mostly chewy, stubbly skin and tendons. We bought a whole one which was chopped with a dirty meat cleaver into six portions and served head, claws and all on a platter with rice and potatoes.

yum yum, Natalie wasn't too keen though


On day two we hired some mountain bikes for the 60km downhill trip to Puyo through the picturesque valley, past some beautiful waterfalls and several cable cars and ziplines rigged up somewhat dodgily by the locals. We didn't make it all the way down but we did stop off at an amazing waterfall with a series of viewing platforms concreted onto and chisled into the cliffs below the falls.

Stopping off for some pics

looking down from the waterfall

One platform was cut in right under the falls, about 40m up

Next stop was Mancora, a cool but touristy little surfing town in the desert just inside the Peruvian border. We spent two days here relaxing on the beach and in the hostel bar and also had a go at a surfing lesson, which was great fun and surprisingly easy to stand up, although my arms and ribcage (from digging into the board while paddling) were killing me the next day.

The hostel was awesome, like a backpacker resort

As time was now running low I bid farewell to the girls and hopped a bus down along the pacific coast the to Lima, which was 20 hours of complete moonscape, just sand and rocks for hundreds of kilometres, not a living thing in sight.


the sunset was pretty amazing too
This was backed up a day later with another two buses down to the Chilean border and finally Santiago, a trip of over 55 hours and 3500km, but on big comfortable buses it wasn't that bad really.

Somehow I'd forgotten a day along the way so I now had two free days to kill in Santiago and what better way to kill some time than go to a Smashing Pumpkins concert! Dave and Alicia, an Irish couple I'd met in Nicaragua were in town too so after a few beers beside the hostel pool we got a cab out to the stadium and to one of the best gigs I've seen in ages.

Go pumpkins!!

Dave was pretty excited

Twelve hours later I was anxiously waiting at the international arrivals gate at Santiago airport, not sure if I'd remembered the right time for mum's flight and with a horrible feeling that it was actually an hour earlier.......

Cotopaxi climb

We set off for the mountain at six in the morning in an old landcruiser; myself, two other backpackers from Ireland and Canada respectively and our two guides. Two hours of bumpy gravel later we arrived at the end of the road and geared up for the hike up from the carpark to the climbing refuge, at 4800m. I had brought along around 8 litres of water and with that in my pack along with all the other gear and food for the next two days I was carrying at least 20kg, and on steep, soft scree at 4500m I was really feeling it. The other guys were streaking ahead and when I finally got to the top I was getting a little worried about my fitness levels, until I felt the other guys bags and they were less than half the weight of mine. Apparently we were going to be supplied with water at the refuge, nice to know.












After setting up our beds in the bunkhouse upstairs (70 people in one room, with bunks stacked three high...) and having a huge and tasty lunch we went up the mountain a few hundred metres to the bottom of a glacier to put on our crampons and practice some ice climbing. We went over the basic walking and rope techniques and practiced braking with the ice axe in case we had a slip in a steep section. After hearing of other climbers' bad experiences (with dodgy tour operators) up here it was good to see that our guides were both very patient and professional and seemed to take safety very seriously. We were also lucky to have two guides for three people, which meant if one person had to turn back the other two could continue with the remaining guide.









Looking up to the summit, doesn't look that far.....

With the refuge in the background

After an early but once again massive and delicious meal for dinner it was off to bed at 8 to hopefully get a bit of sleep before heading off at one in the morning. As a result of the altitude, the constant noise of 70 climbers fumbling around in the dark and the palpable excitement of what would be most peoples first climb noone reported getting any sleep, except for the snoring guy two bunks across who apparently slept like a baby.



With nearly everyone leaving for the summit at either midnight or one it became a bit of a mad scramble to get out on the trail first and with a relatively small group we were lucky enough to get out first of the 1am group, having nothing but the faint, grey glow of the snow fading into the darkness ahead of us.




We started slow and gradually picked up pace as we went along, with the lead guide doing a great job of pacing us so that we stayed within our limits but still made reasonable time. At some points it felt a little too slow but this high up just a couple of quick power steps can leave you gasping for air, and even maintaining the same pace I would feel great and strong on one section and then like I was pushing my limit ten minutes later. Apart from being a bit more puffed than usual I wasn't really feeling the altitude at all, no headache, no nausea and a nice clear mind. The two weeks of sitting around in Quito were paying off! Apparently being a smoker is also an advantage, as your body has adapted to regularly being low on oxygen, nice.




Around halfway up the Canadian guy started to get a bit woozy and threw up a couple of times, which I thought was a bad sign but the guides didn't seem worried, and he kept on going as normal. The route was also more precipitous than I had imagined, as it is considered a non-technical climb I assumed we would just be walking up a smooth slope of snow. In reality it was a lot more interesting, with walls of ice, gullys, big cracks and crevasses and some enormous and oddly shaped icicles. Some parts were also very steep, with the lead guide having to kick the path into the slope, and requiring us to use the axe and hug the side, carefully checking each footing before putting weight on it. As it was dark there were no real views to speak of, other than the murky orange glow of Quito down in the valley far below, and the long winding snake of headlamps gradually working their way up towards us.




A few hundred metres before the summit I was feeling great and overtook the other two who had slowed down slightly and by this stage were looking a little haggard. My guide and I steamed off and were maybe 50 metres ahead when he suggested that we wait for the others to catch up, which took a good five minutes as by now they were going very slowly. They caught and passed us and as we started up behind them and attempted to get back into the rhythm I found I was suddenly very weak and right on my limit. The next forty five minutes were a real struggle as countless times we approached what appeared to be the top only to find that there was yet another rise on the other side. I knew we were very close and each time I convinced my body that this surely must be the final desperate push, but as we crested the horizon and I prepared to flop down limply in the snow my heart sank time and time again.




At last, and as I was on the verge of finally calling a stop before I crumpled in a heap the slope opened out and started to descend slightly. Looking around I gradually comprehended that there were no other higher points around, this was it, we'd made it!!!


This was as enthusiastic as we could get

The crater

Upon reaching our goal it was hard to know what to feel. All I wanted to do was to lay down and have a good rest but with so little oxygen in the air (less than half the amount that there is at sea level) this was next to impossible. It didn't really feel like reaching the end of anything at all ( and it wasn't really, we still had to get back down which is just as dangerous as climbing up) so I guess in a funny way the real summit was the biggest false summit of all! There were thick clouds in all directions down below us blocking everything from sight too which was a little disappointing but peering down into the steaming crater was nice, and it really did feel like we were on top of the world.

After taking the obligatory triumphant photos and having a swig of some nasty cooking brandy (?!?) that someone had brought along for the celebrations we thankfully started back down by the same track that we had come up on, and a lot faster than you would think. Yet another funny thing I noticed about altitude is that while it is ridiculously hard to go uphill, on the flat and going down feels only slightly more difficult than at sea level.

Despite being more than a bit stuffed and myself getting along by more of a controlled stagger than a walk we made it down more than half way before we needed a break. We stopped off for ten minutes and then continued down quite uneventfully, taking it easy and getting a few snaps on the way, as we could now actually see what was around us.

It had taken us 4 hours 50 min to get to the summit from the refuge which was a pretty good time for inexperienced climbers ( usual time is between 5 and 6 hours) but a hell of a long way off the record of 1 hr 30! ( our guide had once done it in 1:50, alone and with minimal equipment to save weight)

The whole trip (two days with all food, gear, transport and accomodation) cost 170 dollars, which is a bargain really and a fraction of what you'd pay in a western country. The company I went with (CarpeDM Adventures) were very professional and with great gear and food and I'm currently making plans to return to Ecuador to climb Chimborazo (6300m) with them early next year :)

Quito days

Arriving in Quito at 11 o'clock at night I noticed that my foot was starting to get a little tight in my shoe. At the hostel I took off the shoe and was greeted by a very, very big bright red foot. Taking this as a bad sign I went off to bed with the determination to go down to the clinic in the morning if things hadn't improved over night, as with long bus and plane rides your feet tend to swell up anyway. In the morning it had turned kind of purplish and there was now a dark blue circle where the bite had been, definitely time to go to the clinic.......

In the clinic the doctor took one look at it and sent me straight upstairs to the hospital to go on an antibiotic drip, and this was where I would spend the next four days, watching TV in spanish, eating mushy, salty food and pretending to understand what the nurses and doctors were saying. There were maybe ten different nurses and four doctors coming in from time to time, each saying and doing different and sometimes seemingly contradictory things, which had me a little worried, especially when they would do things like forgetting to turn the drip on, plugging the tubes into the wrong spots, etc......

I did have a private room though, with a nice view of the city

The worst part was on the second last day when one of the doctors popped the pimple thing on my foot. By now it was a big purple lump about as big as a 50 cent (Australian) coin and of course the pus was way down deep inside, needing a good twenty minutes of digging around with a needle and tweezers to get it out. It actually made a loud popping sound too, gross.

After two days of antibiotics


Still, on the fourth day I walked out into the sunshine feeling a hell of a lot better and got straight onto my insurance company to pay the bill ($1147 for four days!!).

After being out for a couple of days my right arm where the drip had been was still swollen and sore so it was back again to the clinic, this time it was just a bad reaction to the drugs in the drip and they gave me some creams to put on it for a few days, after which it felt a lot better, although my vein is still rock hard now, almost a month later.

While I was waiting for the insurance company to pay out and to be able to go and collect my passport from the clinic (it was being held ransome!) I was lucky enough to be staying in a great hostel with a really cool bunch of people. Every day we would go out and do something, and Quito is actually a pretty good choice of city to get stuck in, with a world heritage listed historic centre, huge mountain peaks with great hiking all around and a big backpacker party scene. This was all helped along nicely by free rum and coke three nights a week in the hostel, with 24hr toasted sandwiches in the TV room......

At the hostel getting ready for a night out



One of the must do's in Quito: the equator line! (the real equator is actually 1km away)




In the basilica tower with Ramses, Carrie and Denny from the hostel



Stairs up were a bit dodgy though (on the outside of the tower...)







The santuario de Jesus, with over seven tonnes of gold leaf!






Up the Teleferico two and a half kilometres above Quito to the start of the Rucu Pichincha (4700m) hike (I did this twice as acclimatization runs for Cotopaxi)


Rucu Pichincha

the friendly eagle eyeing off Denny's sandwiches



The summit

It would be almost two weeks from when I got out of hospital to when the insurance paid out and I could collect my passport, so with little left to do in the city and most of my friends moving on I left town for two days to climb Cotopaxi (5897m) a huge, snowclad, active volcano two hours from town......

The rest of Colombia

The bus down to Bogota turned into a total mission, 20 hrs with the aircon on full blast (Why do they do this? everyone was freezing) and a horribly uncomfortable seat. At one point after 7hrs without a stop I was dying of thirst and did something kinda stupid; I had a few sips of water from the sink in the toilet, big mistake.

Arriving in Bogota everything was fine and I settled in for an afternoon nap (I love naps) only to wake up two hours later with a raging fever. I thought maybe I was just dehydrated so I downed a few glasses of water but then things became even more interesting, particularly in the digestive system.....

Three days and only two meals later I was starting to think that maybe I had dengue fever or something so I went down to the clinic and was put on a drip straight away. No dengue fortunately and after two big bags of saline I felt ten times better, probably could have saved 150 dollars just by drinking a bit more water..... The doctor prescribed 5 different drugs to take to get rid of the bugs but I thought I`d give it a day and see how I felt first.

That night was a party bus tour of Bogota stopping at three clubs along the way and after feeling great all afternoon I grabbed a seat, along with two other guys from Melbourne (there are Aussies everywhere in Colombia, possibly even the biggest nationality of backpackers there). Was an epic night, finishing up watching the sunrise from a club on the 30th floor of a building in town with a couple of hundred other backpackers and locals all getting down seriously hard. Bogota sure knows how to party!!!

The Plaza de Simon Bolivar near my hostel, I stayed in La candelaria, the old quarter.

Las candelaria has a great vibe, kinda alternative artsy with lots of bars and cafes

The next day after a good sleep in I walked down to the gold museum to check out the huge collection of pre-Colombian artefacts in what is amongst the greatest gold museums in the world.

So much gold.....

This guy was my favourite:

Not surprisingly they have some serious doors there

Bogota is a great city and definitely my favourite one so far in Latin America. Very well organised with modern transport, very clean (so nice to be somewhere clean again) and heaps to see and do. The people are really friendly too.

After Bogota I caught the bus down to Salento via Armenia to see some wax palms. I had seen some photos of the area and it looked spectactular, with 70/80 foot high palm trees poking out above the rainforest canopy and more dotted about the rolling hills of farmland surrounding the town. I arrived in Armenia too late to get to Salento that day so spent the night in a hotel and went over the next morning.

My plan was to get to town and walk around and over to the valley nearby where the wax palms supposedly were. I probably should have done some more research before I left because when I got to the town ( a very pretty little town nonetheless) I walked up the hill to see absolutely no wax palms for miles in every direction. I then found out that the valley was 11 km away and then you have to keep walking on from there to the palms, DOH!

The view was quite nice however and back in town I had some amazing and cheap local Coffee (this area is the main coffee producing region in Colombia, one of the biggest coffee exporters in the world) and a nice lunch and sat in the square in the sun with a good book waiting for the bus back to Armenia.

Salento

Next stop was Medellin for the weekend and some more partying. I stayed Casa Kiwi, a great hostel with a rooftop pool and a bar downstairs so the partying was not hard to come by and I had another great Saturday night of drinking, talking crap and dancing my dubious version of Salsa.

The road from Armenia to Medellin had some great views:


Medellin from the roof of the hostel


From Medellin to Cali next (absolutely nothing going on there....) and then from Cali down to the Ecuadorian border. In Cali I noticed a small pimple/bite thing on my foot and after dealing with it I thought that would be the end of the story. My foot was kind of aching a little bit but I got on the bus from Cali to the border anyway, little aches and pains usually sort themselves out pretty quick after all.

Just inside the Colombian side of the border I took a quick detour to check out the famous church on the river near Ipiales, very pretty:



Ha Ha, nice hats guys


And into Ecuador....

Cartegena and Taganga

Cartagena itself, whilst definitely a beautiful, interesting and history-filled place just didn´t really captivate me in the way I had assumed it would. I guess this was mostly to do with the fact that I had by now seen half a dozen of these restored colonial cities and was finding it a bit hard to get excited about old(ish) buildings.

The big fort overlooking town


Still my visit did include a day out at the mud volcano, bobbing around with 20 other backpackers in lukewarm, slightly stinky mud with the consistency of thick cream:

glad I had a shower before I left the hostel

not so clean now



time to rinse off in the lagoon


Next stop was the small fishing village of Taganga four hours away for more some scuba diving to keep my skills up and some lazing around on the beach. I shared a cab from Santa Marta, the city in the next bay, with Kassia, a Brazilian girl Id met on the bus, and rocked up at a small hostel some friends had recommended to her, hostel Chez Moi. Turned out to be the best hostel I´ve stayed in all trip, mostly due to the two Colombian owners, Angie and Cata, being two of the most fun, welcoming and friendly people in the world.

kinda Mexican landscapes around town, lots of lizards and cactuses

These lizards where absolutely everywhere


The diving turned out to be a no go as the visibility was terrible due to the recent rain however the beach was still lovely and just chilling in the hostel with a few beers and heaps of good people was more than reason enough to stay for a week.



The second afternoon we had a painting/drinking session (always a great mix!) and we all added our own little touch to the hostel´s eclectic decorations.

Angie and I with our mountains, sealife and other random things (I apologise for the surfing Kangaroo, I was drunk after all....)

During the week I popped over to Tayrona National Park to explore its many small boulder strewn bays and coves, although I was a little disappointed at how expensive it was (20 bucks to get in, 9 for a hammock and at least 8 for each meal). Also it was pretty much exactly the same as Wilsons Promontory NP near Melbourne, same rocks, same sand, same mozzies, even down to the red lichen on the boulders....


Well it was kinda pretty I suppose

Another day was also made out at Los Angeles beach a little further out along the coast, as it was Angies day off and she wanted to show us a bit more of the area. Had a great day playing around in the sand and surf and maybe we got a little too much sun because somehow Angie and I missed the last bus back to town. With no torch, no money and no real idea how to get a ride back we shuffled back up the path to the main road and spent the next two hours frantically waving Angies mobile phone at passing cars and trucks. Of course I was playing it super cool and doing my best ¨tough Aussie bushman¨ impersonation but secretly I was getting a little worried; the middle of nowhere in Colombia at night is definitely not a great place for a spot of hitchhiking.

We did manage to get a bus back (eventually) and even a cab back to the hostel. It really goes to show that no matter how tricky a situation you get in travelling something always happens to sort it out, you just need to be patient (sometimes very patient) and just keep asking people.

Was a great time in Taganga and I could have easily spent a few weeks or even months there but in the end the show must go on, and there is still so much to see and do before Santiago. Next stop: Bogota....