Wanderlust

As high as I’ve ever been

August 11, 2007 at 1:49 pm elinordye Leave a comment

I’m in Arequipa, the second largest city in Peru, cradled in the valley of El Misti, a 19,000 foot volcano that I stood on top of yesterday.  It was pretty incredible to be looking down into the crater of an active volcano. The smell of sulphur suffused the air every time the wind shifted and I felt lightheaded and precarious looking down. 

It was a two day trek led by Carlos Zarete Aventuras, which is a fantastic tour company. Carlos, the grandson of the original Carlos, was our guide on the trek.  We had three porters to carry our stuff, which normally I’d object to, but when base camp is as high as I’d ever climbed before and we hadn’t acclimatized at all, I was in no position to complain. I was popping Diamox like they were party favors – it helps immensely with the acclimitization to the altitude even though it makes you have to pee basically every hour.  It was an exercise in bladder control, let me tell you. We arrived at base camp around 4 pm, and basically sat around talking until dinner was ready.  While I still prefer camping on my own, I think, it was pretty luxurious to walk into the mess tent and have someone hand me a bowl of soup.

We got up at 3:30 the next morning in order to be up and down the mountain before early afternoon. (I’m still not entirely sure why this was necessary, but I didn’t get a straight answer out of anyone). We did go to bed at 8 pm, so I guess they figure that 7 and a half hours of sleep is enough. 

I bundled into all the warm clothes that Elizabeth’s friend Emi had lent me (thanks guys!) and we hit the trail. Base camp was at 15,650 feet, so we had a little less than 3,500 feet to climb yesterday. At that altitude, though, every 500 feet of elevation gain takes the best part of an hour. 

The stars were stunningly dense – the Milky Way sharply etched against a field of every star in the universe. The Inka (which, Ben, you do spell with a K, at least down here) didn’t define constellations as such, but instead saw animals in  the voids in the Milky Way. When you look at the Milky Way here, it makes sense – it appears as clouds of stars, so tightly packed that it’s impossible to distinguish any individual star, except where voids appear. 

We started up the mountain in the dark, headlamps illuminating the ash under our feet. I walked automatically, planting my feet in Carlos’s footsteps. As we walked the dark drained out of the sky in the East, and the sun painted the distant mountains crimson ocher and every shade of gold.

Climbing the mountain was basically like climbing a giant sand dune – the trail was lightly etched onto a giant ash fall punctuated occasionally by huge volcanic rocks. 

We reached the top around 11, the cold wind howling around a massive metal cross that some evangelical and slightly insane Catholics hauled to the summit. 

What took us 9 hours to climb up took less than 2 to slide down, since every footstep slid into the scree and took us more than three strides down the hill. As a consequence of descending so fast, though, my right ear didn’t equalize properly to the increase in pressure and is just now clearing.

When we returned to the transportes, there was a young Argentinian hippie talking agitatedly to our porters. He looked utterly ill-equipped to be out in such an unforgiving landscape – he was wearing sandals and didn’t seem to have any extra clothing with him. Through a combination of eavesdropping and asking Carlos, I found out that he had been climbing El Misti the day before and had gotten separated from his sister, who he hadn’t seen since. He looked more than anything kind of forlorn – he certainly wasn’t displaying the kind of frantic anxiety I would feel if I had lost my sister on a mountain with no shelter for miles where it got below freezing at night.  When we started hiking before dawn the water in my camelbak was completely frozen.

Our guides gave him some food and water and he walked out alone, over the dunes.

We leave Arequipa for Los Angeles tomorrow, so we’re spending today seeing everything there is to see in the city, including an almost intact mummy called “Juanita” which was discovered on the slopes of El Misti by Miguel Zarete, Carlos’s uncle. 

Entry filed under: On the Road. Tags: .