16,000 feet

We tried to spend last night at the Chimborazo base camp and failed. We should have known better than to try and sleep where no one lives and even the vicuna population (wild relative of llamas and alpacas) thins out!! At 4:19am we had to bail because of mountain sickness. We fled the mountain with the van top still up and dinner leftovers skittering around on the stove.

It started out as a good day. I was feeling better, though hollow and light as a feather. We were tired of the hotel room (more likely we were scared our brains would rot because of too much TV – we watched heaps of it the day before, half in Spanish and half in English – nature shows on Colombian birds, several episodes of Heroes, not a bad show if not for the brain-eating subplot, and a movie with Tom Cruise as a hitman) and wanted to move on to another town, not too far away, just in the rainshadow so everything wouldn’t be so wet.

We piled into the van and took off for Chimborazo, a nearby volcano that is also the point on the earth closest to the sun (something to do with the earth’s bulge, ask Douglas). There’s a fauna reserve there, and we thought it would be a nice quiet place to spend the night (ha!!). The drive up was spectacular. As the road went up and up through green mountains, the afternoon rain and fog set in, only to vanish abruptly just as Chimborazo came into view. The mountain stops all clouds in their tracks, and just on the other side the landscape is dry and sunny.

As Chimborazo loomed, we also started to see what we thought were particularly cute llamas, but later found out are vicunas (Douglas says he knew this all along), a wild relative of llamas and alpacas with particularly fine hair. The Inca ruler would only wear clothes made out of vicuna hair; everyone else had to settle for alpaca. We stopped and took endless vicuna pictures, then finally made our way up to the base camp, where climbers attempting Chimborazo’s summit stay to acclimatize to the altitude. We should have known that somewhere so high wouldn’t be healthy, but it didn’t occur to us that somewhere we could *drive* to could make us so sick!!

The base camp was nice in a rugged, snowy moonscape sort of way. We whiled away a few hours looking around, making some food, etc. Douglas went for a bikeride, and we cooked dinner when he came back. We were feeling kind of short of breath, but we figured that if we just drank lots of water and didn’t run around too much we’d be OK. Shortly after dinner we both started to feel bad (splitting headaches), and decided to head down the mountain a bit, to where the main road turns off to the base camp. We stopped there and tried to sleep, but our headaches got increasingly worse. Douglas couldn’t sleep at all, and then he started to feel really nauseous. At 4:19am, we couldn’t take it anymore and bailed.

We’ve spent the day recovering, parked on the side of the road just outside of Guaranda, on the way to Salinas (the chocolate/cheese/sweater town). We’ve had a nice rainy sort of day, puttering around in the van and doing all the projects we were putting off at the end of the Central American leg of the trip, worried that we might never see the van again. Tomorrow, probably, we’ll be off to Banos, a small town that’s a hub of mountain biking/trekking activity. Apparently they have some cafes that show movies every night at 8pm, and some good book exchanges, so we’ll both have something to do. Finding good books is turning out to be way harder in South America than it was in Central America – I wish I had bought more when I had the chance.

Side note: on the next trip like this I will pack a hefty supply of rooster poison.