6 rolled by, i felt fine...it was a night of celebration for the group. We were fresh off the Salkantay and Machu Picchu. It was the last night for Tylan (he was heading home in the morning), i was leaving that night, and Jack and Russel were off to Bolivia in a day. We decided upon a massive feast and as we cooked some frozen hamburg i noted its pink hue (despite being fully cooked), maybe the pink i saw in my burger previously was just a pink thats in all of them...i hoped. I felt fine, i gorged, 3 plates of lentiles, rice, meat and veg (check out all the colors in that first pic!).
7:00 pm I felt fine, i left in a rush...
8:00 pm i got to the bus station, got my seat and shipped out, felt fine
8:30 pm...gurgle gurgle...I broke records with fart length, i was letting them rip for, i shit you not, 20 to 30 seconds at a time. i had never been in so much pain in my life from gas cramps. I knew i was fucked. i could literally hear the gas shifting around the liquid in my intentines...it was really only a matter of time.
I suffered in cold sweats for 2 hours, rolled from one side to the other, farted like i was supplying a power plant with its fuel to light a small city. It then hit and it hit quickly...i jumped up, i needed a bag, i was going to puke! oh shit...i was also going to shit...Thank god the bathroom was free.
You dont throw your toilet paper in the toilets here..you throw it in the trash. So while we hurtled down windy Peruvian roads at 100 k´s per hour i was getting tossed around the closet sized bathroom with my face burried in other peoples shit stained TP throwing up 3 plates worth of lentils and rice while i simultaneously unleashed one of the most violent gas fortified rounds of liquid shitting the world has ever seen...it was a seeeeeeerious mess!
The puking and shitting lasted for 6 more hours. apparently i had 2.5 days of food inside of me, i knew because i saw every single bit of it!
I landed in Arequipa Peru at 5am, wandered for an hour finding a hostal. I was ghoast white, exhuasted, dehydrated, destroyed. I slept for 4 hours and then took myself to the hospital. I got tested for giardia - they needed a sample. They gave me a 1 inch diameter test tube to get the sample in...it wasnt pretty...thats a hard shot to make! Im sure someone was wondering what the hell the gringo was laughing at in the waiting room bathroom. God it was comical!
Test results came back the next day....the lab and a pharmacist both said i had giardia and i was given a 1 week course of meds, the actual lab results (to the best of my knowledge) said i didn´t have giardia...who knows. i had salmanella, that was for sure!
SO anyways, i was in Arequipa to Climbs volcanoes...except it was pissing down rain and there would be no cilmbing. A day later i got on a 33 hour bus ride south to get of out the Northern Andes rainy season and landed in San Pedro De Atacama in the Chilean Atacama desert.
I met two amazing climbing girls from North Carolina and followed them to a crag, spent a night and then found a random volcano to climb. It was good. Here are the pictures!
The final super...i would soon be seeing this for a second time
You gotta leave one country to make it to another...Goodbye Peru, you are amazing, i will return with a kayak to make love to your rivers
Hi Chile, Well aren't you looking fine...well actually you're looking a bit dry and desolate to be honest
Not much of a visual greeting up in these parts, but given there's 4500 kilometers south of me, i'm sure i'll be able to find something good to feast my eyes upon over the next 3 months here.
yikes
Man, when i was in the store Cream Cheese, Tuna and Crackers sounded like an amazing mid voyage snack...i had looked forward to it for 16 hours sitting on the bus but when it finally produced itself, well, you can see what it looked like...The 'Cream Cheese' needed no help in spreading itself - it was already liquid for some reason. The 'Tuna' was of course the cheapest i can could find ('Grated' which obviously stands for 'Scraps leftover that only cheap people eat, bones and heads included, maybe an eyeball if you're lucky')and of course to make it more fatty since i've lost 15 pounds and I am on a mission to gain it back i picked Grated Tuna in Vegetable oil, it didn't add much to the presentation.
If the rivers are running on the desert coast, its definitely raining inland - these guys only run a few times a year
Ahhh Finally there... San Pedro De Atacama...you lovely artificial little tourist bubble in a sea of dry red desert...Its volcano hunting time!
Volcano Lascanbar...the most commonly climbed one around. And easy non-tech slog up, that is, from the Bolivian side. From the Chilean side you have an anti-tank and anti-personal mine field located along its entire flanks - but really you just have to worry about the anti-personal mines as i was told a person isnt heavy enough to set off a tank mine ...lucky me. The $150 reciprocity fee you have to pay to get into Bolivia kept me off the Bolivian side and for obvious reasons i also stayed off the Chilean side. Time to find a different Volcano to climb...
Ah, there you are my little beauty...mind if i walk up your flanks? Cerro (or Volcano) Miñiques, twin peaked at 5755 m and 5916 m, i would eventually find my way up the 'mostly' non-techincal shorter summit. But first, i had to get there.
lots and lots and lots of sand
Valle De La Luna just outside of San Pedro and a nice sunset walk after 33 hours on a bus
Everything here drips salt, its a literally just a huge salt lick
A ridge of Volcanoes stretching north and south, on average i believe this is the highest region of the Andes.
The moon?
No, just the desert
Its just like Utah
They have no topo maps for sale in town. There are 30 or 40 adventure outfitters trying to drag every gringo in site into their shop to sell them their special adventure tour. Every 'adventure ' is spoon fed to you by the tourist agency, why would you need a map of your own? My only strategy was to take a photo of this topo map which sat under glass on a desk at one of the guiding places...at 100 m resolution it left a lot to be desired, and as it turned out distances were hard to judge in this expansive land
With map in err, the camera, we were off hitch hiking to our destination...of course i let the ladies do the hard work of getting us a ride...and a terrific job they did!
I think the desolation, sun, heat, dryness and general hostal environment all play into the phyche of drivers...how can you honestly drive by someone on the side of the road in a place like this...ive heard stories of people waiting 3 days for a car to drive by on more desolate stretches with those poor souls nearly meeting death after their water runs out and there's no where to go...luckily this was a 'main' road with 1 car every 15 or 20 minutes...we had no issues.
Working hard to get the 3rd of 4 rides out to the crag...the ladies obviously picked up their game with some enticing strategies.
Hey look...do you see that? Nope. Yea me either...SO MUCH Nothingness
Desert heat waves over the salt flats
Nicole going a little crazy in the heat
We found the canyon!!!! but we walked the wrong direction down it...oops, just a 5 hour mistake
She was a real bueat though, a little oasis crack in the desert
Dove Eggs
After 3 hours of walking the crack we found water and...
....Went duck hunting! Quack Quack...Actually we were just filtering water
We finally looped back on ourselves and found the bolted crag and set up shop...not a bad campsite!
Miñiques...from camp the first night. i really had no idea if it was climbable, there was what looked like a high saddle at snow zone on the left - meaning a water source and flat ground. From there i would 'just see' if she had a route up
Down towards the salt.
Sunset from our crack
Full moon rise from our crack
The moon emerging
Morning at last and time to leave the ladies behind and take off on my own...the plan was to hitch to a touristy lake at the base of the mountain and walk from there. Turns out the first vehicle to drive by was a tour van packed with Brits heading to the lake. The didn't stop when they passed me but they had slowed down, it was obvious they were weighing their decision, the van was clearly hesitating, they were 200 ft past me and i did what seemed the right thing to do - i started running at them...it worked! I would later find out that they had made a group decision NOT to pick me up, but when they saw me full out sprinting at them with a heavy pack they changed their mind and rewarded me for a good effort...
Im climbing that one, i said to them...they seemed excited by the idea as much as i did...How, why, with who, i was momentarily in their spot light
They insisted they take a parting shot of me before i left them...me with two tomatoes in hand for dinner and the lakes behind me
Volcanoes everywhere!
through my sunnies
My mountain to the right and the obvious high elevation saddle just to its left...i would camp just to the right of that cloud essentially right at snow line (the only water source, the lake is saline. Around here it was a world run by water, you left a water source and you HAD to know where the next one one, and you had to make it there...meaning i also had to walk with 4 litres of water, more weight, hoof)
up and up...3500 ft to base camp which sat at 16,500 ft
I arrived at camp at 2:30 pm, the sun was still nearly straight up and i didn{t feel like waiting around allllll day to go to bed, so i figured, well i might as well try to summit today...baaaad idea
Poorly planned, badly executed!
free water in a rock bowl
Right, so the sun soaked snow was (of course) very soft so every step i post holed - sometimes ankle sometimes knee deep. Going was slow, i wasn´t allll that acclimated, i didn´t have alllll that much energy left in me...i started to bonk, the weather started to get worse - temps below freezing and 30 mph winds = not fun (but really not that bad i guess). I had a bad habbit of going from the slow bent over slog position quickly to the standing straight up to look what what above me, this lead to many occasions of the blood quickly draining from my head and me having to drop quickly to the snow to keep from blacking out...also not fun (well sorta fun)
Ha! what a gapper!
Ha! what a gapper!
Bonk!
I hit the wall hard and decided to back off, the altitude was definitely getting to me..the mountain would be there in the morning.
I got back to ´camp´completely exhausted and with hardly enough energy to set up the tent or make dinner. Sleeping at 16,500ft doesn´t offer much in the way of recovery from altitude sickness and it was a long cold night.
Dinner in the dark
Morning...it was in the teens over night
So much for an Alpine start...despite leaving the tent at 8 am the snow was still hard and with strength in my legs and better lungs and thicker bloods i was covering the terrain quickly. I made my highpoint from the day before in half the time
Awesome crazy snow formations called Penitentes
The going was steep and i woulda been happier with axe and crampons but i was without. Instead it was just smart route finding. I stayed close to the Penitentes which where big and thick enough to catch and arrest a fall...it woulda been kinda like bowling, i used to bowl in highschool, i have trophies...i imagined i woulda been good at this kinda bowling too!
Summit...18,876 ft
The weather was perfect, no wind, no clouds, just me and the top. Although summits i find are strange places, not somewhere i care to linger, the joy is more in the climb and so after a few token and very cliche summit pics i was off to tent...Snow was now perfect, an inch of soft on top of crust meant boot skiing could be done down even the steapest bits...i dropped 2000 ft in 15 minutes...soooo much fun!
See those volcanoes to the right, see what looks like a tiny little drainage pulling away to the left at their base...thats the crack the ladies were climbing in and that was my destanation for the afternoon....little did i know it was A LOT further way than it looked!
Hi Bolivia, you and your stupid $140 reciprosity fee...(yes i know they charge us cause we charge them, but even still!)
The taller twin summit, also the more technical of the two...nothing i wanted anything to do with
I dropped off the summit, got to my tent, broke camp and ran off the mountain...only 3 hours from the summit i was 5,500 ft lower and 5 k´s away looking back at a morning well done!
It was a straight line from where i left to where i was going...i walked 7 hours in a straight line, god it was boring!
The scenary really didn´t change too quickly, if you hadn´t already gathered that from the pictures!
Still going in the same direction
Still
More straight line
Getting Closer!!!!!! So close to the drainage!
Looking down towards my drainage!
He didn´t like walking in a straight line
Finally water after 9 hours of walking
Dropping in, getting green, still going in the same direction though!
The great bend!!!!!! After 10 hours of walking in the same direction, i took a left!!!!
The canyon was spectacular and the setting sun lit up the 1000 ft red walls perfectly...
I found a patch of flat grass and called it a day, 11.5 hours after setting out for the summit. I had climbed 3000 ft and dropped 6,000 and walked about 25 k´s.
Morning jump shots for my favorite Kiwi couple shaun and Jaqs who were getting married in a few days!
The next morning saw an hour more of walking until i found the ladies...they had had a wonderful time in the crack over the previous 2 days...climbing, being fed by random tours who dropped in (steak and wine!) and made ´friends´with a random german who also found them. The sent me off with extra food they couldnt eat and i was stoked! a final jump shot and we parted ways with plans to meet back in San Pedro
Big holes, big enough to climb in
I then hitched a ride with another tour van who was going to the salt flats and let me join in, so i got a free tour and we went and saw flamingos in the desert...i had ti pinch myself
dersert worn
I left San Pedro a day later to a sand twister...it was a perfect way to go
And then i landed in Santiago, the land of Dong X-ing, or Dong Xing (´Zing´) whichever Dong you prefer!
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