Mountains Suck

As I wake up every morning and walk to the Instituto, I still can’t get over the fact that I have mountains a few kilometers away. I am blown away everyday, and I am trying my hardest not to take for granted this beautiful scenery. However, I felt that in order to truly take in the scenery, I should climb the mountain. Of course, I didn’t want to climb this mountain by myself, so I suckered…I mean…asked my great friends, Ryan and Caitlin (I would have asked Emily…but she went on a trip this weekend), to climb the mountain with me. Since they are pretty “tranquil” people, they agreed. The only catch was that Caitlin wanted to beat the heat and meet up at her place around 6:15 in the FREAKIN’ MORNING!

Saturday morning, Ryan comes over to my place and we hitch a ride with a taxi to Caitlin’s crib. She hops in the taxi and off we go to face Mt. Tunari. After about a 30 minute drive we finally get to the park entrance. We pay the taxi driver, and about 6:45, still half asleep, we start following a trail.

After about 15 minutes, we really don’t know where the trail is leading, and ask for directions. (You would think we would take this as a sign of what might happen in the future, but we didn’t even think of it.) After getting pointed in the right direction, we come to a fork in the road. On one side, there are five barking dogs and the other side a nice house. Being all in agreement that we don’t need another dog incident, we don’t pay any attention to the dogs and take the path to the house. Then we hear “No hay camino alla!” Now we are like “Crap, we have to back track and face those dogs, because there isn’t a path this way. Good going us!” We go back a half of kilometer and find a path. We take the path and finally begin to find steps. We start making our way up the stairs and get really tired, really fast. We take several breaks, and drink a lot of water. After about two hours of hiking up these natural stairs, we decide that it would be easier to take the road. The only bad thing about the road is that it has several zig-zags, instead of going straight up. After about another hour or so (around 10 kilometer marker) we reach a really cool playground.

Instead of conserving our energy, we play around. I decide to go down the biggest slide that I have gone down in a while, and Ryan anxiously waiting for a partner to play on the teeter-totter. After sliding down the slide, and hitting an invisible hump on the slide (that hurt like no other) I joined Ryan. We start playing around on the teeter-totter and had a blast. (Side note: If any of y’all have the opportunity to play on one of those things DO IT. I bet you have already forgotten how much fun they are.) Caitlin took some pictures of us, and then I switched out with her and got some pictures of them. After goofing off for a while, we started up the mountain again.

Now it’s about 10:20, we have been hiking for about 4 hours, and we are dying. I don’t know what is keeping us going but we miraculously continue to put one foot in front of the other. Around 10:40, we swear we have found the peak, only to be fooled and realize that there is no way we are ever going to reach the peak. So we pick the highest spot that we are at, and claim its one of the peaks of Mt. Tunari. We get some great pictures and then peace out of there.

Our way down is where the fun began. Instead of following the road (that zig-zagged) we decided to cut corners. This worked the first few times, but on the third or fourth try, we found the flaw in our plan. After about 15 minutes of hiking down the side of a mountain, we realized that we weren’t going to intersect with the path. By this time Caitlin is mocking our idea and we are all getting tired. However, Ryan keeps an optimistic point of view saying “Don’t worry Caitlin we are going in the right direction…DOWN…and making great time!” After another 10 minutes, Ryan and I see the path; however, we realize that it’s on the mountain to our left. Somehow we crossed mountains and we knew that there was no way we would intersect the path. To make matters worse, or to add a sense of adventure, the clouds behind us look really black and we know there is a storm on the way. I don’t know how, but in less than an hour we find ourselves walking through a small village. The people are really helpful and then we end up passing the same little shack where six hours earlier we asked directions to find the mountain path. Needless to say, we took the first taxi turfi to town, and walked home from there.

Altogether it was a great experience, and I feel a lot closer to Caitlin and Ryan. Mainly cause we didn’t kill each other on that mountain.