Such Great Heights

PapaGayo, Machachi

A Perfect Traveler´s Day
It´s getting harder to top the heights I´m reaching. It was a Sunday, and it was supposed to be a chill, easy day. I wasn´t supposed to be celebrating at 5,000 meters, a new personal Ecuadorian record. I had purchased a train ticket to Parque El Boliche for $2, a national park right next to Cotopaxi National Park, one of the highest volcanos in Ecuador. Boliche is the only destination on the train, and you have to take a bus for a half hour from the train terminal to get to a functioning part of the track to start the 3 hour ride (we found out later)! The train is basically for tourists and school trips, and it´s really just a couple single cars on the track that look more like buses. Oh, and you ride on the roof of course. It doesn´t make much sense, I know, but the views are georgeous. I´ve tried to inquire about why Ecuador only has a couple segments of functioning train tracks around the country. 10 years ago, for example, is was possible to take the train from Quito all the way to Guayacil, the port on the southern coast and the business capital. But I guess they have just let things go. My Ecuadorian mom Piedad assured me it was not due to things like the recent war with Peru or any natural disaster.

Oh Dána
I was up early to make the 7am train, and I thought another tourist was following me. She looked about my age and nearly as clueless at 7am on the trolley, a classic start. Within an hour we were friends and set out together for the trip. Dána (pronounced ¨Donna¨) is a wonderful girl from the Czech Republic. She spent part of her education in London (so her Czech accent is negligible) and recently worked in some restaurants there to save money for her South America trip. At home in the Czech Republic she works in her family´s textile machinery parts business. A little sweet-talking to her father and she´s freed up for months at a time to see the world. She told him she´d hunt down some new clients abroad.

Dána is studying in Quito as well but is in Otavalo for a few weeks. She´s been all over the world and is fascinating to talk to about the changes taking place in her area of Eastern Europe. Perhaps the only fault I could gather was her general distaste for art. And apparently her host family´s house here is sick - like they host 5 kids each with their own room in a mansion and have a lounge with a pool table, etc. for parties. I´m definitely inviting myself over.

The train was cool but it hurts your ass to sit on the wooden planks for 3 hours. The crowd on top of the moving vehicle was reminiscent of local Indian buses in Rajasthan, all smiles and legs dangling off the sides. The train was about 80% high school kids on a class trip - and their professor was very friendly and cool with us - the rest were extranjeros like us. It was basically a nice 3 hours to eat munchies, talk, and take pictures of the stunningly beautiful countryside. People passed around chips, juice or 3-liters of coke, and local specialties like sugar cane candies while we barreled through small towns and farmland. There were some mansions in the distance on hilltops overlooking feilds and livestock, and 50 times as many shacks along the tracks. Men weilding machetes and headed for the fields traversed the tracks just ahead or behind us, or children on horseback followed in tow by their traditionally clothed (indiginous) mothers and fathers walked alongside and waved as we passed, the train´s exhaust engulfing their smiles.

When Dána and I arrived in Boliche we were a bit dumfounded of what to do. It is a weekend getaway destination, a place where Ecuadorian families go to enjoy the scenery and picnic. The only building was the small train station with restaurant and a tiny ethnographic museum of some kind across the street. It felt like one of those little train stops in middle-of-nowhere Italy. Beyond that just rolling hills. The only other option was to jump in the back of a few waiting pick-up trucks ($8 per person for foreigners) and head for the adjacent National Park of Cotapaxi - you couldn´t even see the volcano from Boliche. What to do, what to do... The truck takes an hour and a half to reach Cotopaxi which meant by the time we got there we would have to turn around to catch our 2:30pm return train. Plus there´s a $10 park fee at Cotopaxi, and I was only carrying $45. Dana and I were smiling but bored.



How Fortuitous
Then it just happened. Call it traveler´s luck. We spotted a group of tourists behind the train station waiting for a mini-tour bus to show up. Obviously these people had organized a tour that included the morning train ride and more. We spoke with the Israeli tour company owner and guide, Aron, and negotiated a ridiculously cheap price to join them for the ramainder of the day. We even bargained for chocolate cake and and a ride back to Quito. Since Dana and I had a combined $60, and the Cotopaxi entrance fee was $10 each, the two of us paid just $40 for the tour (each pre-registered person had spent $45).

That, my friends, is perfection travel luck - getting the deal but also getting yourself home with not a penny more in your pocket. We now had a long day ahead of us including a trek up the side of Cotopaxi to the refuge for lunch at 4,700 meters, the glacier at 5,000 meters, and then downhill mountain biking from 4,000 meters to end at a nearby lagoon.

Kim
I sat next to an absolutely fascinating woman on the mini-bus right up front next to the crazy driver Ceasar while Aron played Ecuadorian trivia with the passengers further back. Kim is from Alaska but now lives in Antarctica. After years at some boring insurance company and a messy divorce she found a job with a sub-company of a major weapons industry giant like Lockheed or somebody that has the current 10-year contract to conduct research on the American platform base in Antarctica. It makes some sense; she´s from a military background and the several thousand people down there basically live like military. She works as the community´s bank teller but often gets to go on excursions with scientists or attend lectures on their findings concerning climate change, ice caps, animal life, and more. Some things are strange but necessary, like strict dining hall times and just a very routine way of life. For fun they have dances and parties with the nearby New Zealand base, who enjoy more lax rules and allow such things as polar ice cap swimming in your birthday suit. I also learned what it is to get your ¨snow wings¨. Kim only makes like forty grand down there, but it´s free housing, a 5 month job, and no taxes. Plus everyone is routed through New Zealand and constantly arranging sweet fantastic vacations.

Cotopaxi
At the base of Cotopaxi the ground is mysteriously flat. A strange greenish-yellow moss/mushroom mixture covers the earth, one will grow if you put it in water. We took photos of the area and and our guide Aron explained our surroundings, the very real altitude dangers, and finally about how Cotopaxi is active and if it erupts it will cause the evacuation of about 300,000 people in the red zone. They have predicted a large eruption 130 years after the last one, which was in 1877. It was getting cold, luckily I had my hat and bought some gloves to match in the park.

The trek to the refuge at 4,700 meters appears misleadingly easy considering we parked the bus at about 4,000 meters. You can see the small yellow-roofed building like it is right in front of you, and if it were flat and at sea level it might take 5 minutes to reach. It took us 45 min to an hour, zigzagging to conserve energy. At the refuge we sat down to long wooden tables and everyone helped lay out plates of sandwiches, tuna, guacamole, chips, cheese, and hot tea. Upstairs in the refuge more serious climbers with other groups were preparing their cots to turn in at 4pm and awake at midnight to start their 7 hour ascent to the top of the volcano. Some practiced on the glacier nearby, learning how to use there ice picks and spiked boots properly. It´s like $200, but I think I want to try before I come home.

The rest of us sat around congratulating eachother for a solid one-hour hike and then took off for the glacier another half hour above. The view when the clowds actually cleared for ten minutes at a time was spectacular. You are up above most of the clouds, glimpsing the snow-covered peak, then the green surroundings below and two other volcanoes in the distance. A wild cayote followed us up the mountain and made for a nice photograph.

After our descent out came the bikes, and let me tell you it is not easy to do do downhill mountain biking. Forget the location or altitude. The shock your body takes in the legs and handlebars leaves you numb, and you start to hate uneven ground. It´s smart but difficult to keep your limbs and body relaxed for each of the million small impacts. I was exhausted and by the time I reached the lagoon in the hills below I was ready to crash. Our busride entertainment all the way home, after a stop at Aron´s beautiful hostel called PapaGayo (for cake and tea) was a fitting Disney flick called 8 Below about an American base-station in Antarctica with snowdogs.

New Euro Crew
Of course my night did not end there. With a new group of friends from the trip we hit the bars in La Mariscal and I wracked up a nice little debt with my empty pocketbook. I now have a solid group of pub-buddies I know I can find any hour of the day at a certain bar. We get drunk on $1 Pilsners, trade gobsmacking witty banter about cutlery and lashes of things and other such British nonsense, and then go clubbing. The crowd at our table always shrinks and grows depending on new travelers and friends lost and gone forever, but Aaron (English), Charlie (English), and Michele (Swiss) are solid and around for a few weeks more. They are all about 22. Aaron is from Portsmith, very intelligent, and always has a good story. Charlie is from London and dead sexy. She wrote her email address across my back at the club last night, and I learn a lot of new English words from her. Michele is from Basel and smokes too much weed and responds to every question with a big smile and an ¨of course!¨ He plans to start an import-export business with dried fruit between Columbia and Zurich.

That´s about all for now. Next time I´ll talk a bit about Semana Santa, how I completed the minion at the Chabad House for Passover, and my incredible 4 days at Gaby´s beach house in Esmeraldas province this past weekend.