25/10/09 - TeleferiQo

This morning I met Kim from New Zealand and Sandra from Germany. There is a lift called the TeleferiQo that carries you from Quito up the East side of the Pichincha Volcano so that you can climb to it's peak. This lift has been off for a while now so Kim and Sandra had decided to climb it instead. Seeing as I had a day off from Spanish I decided to join them. After all, it was only a four and half thousand foot climb... Incredibly this only started to seem like a bad plan when Kim revealed that she skied constantly and Sandra mentioned that she studied sports at university. I regard myself as fit but come on...

We got a taxi to the entrance of the TeleferiQo where we were told that we weren't allowed to climb up that way for some reason unknown by mortal man. This is where our taxi driver turned out to be really cool as after arguing with the lady at the booth for a while took us to a nearby village where we could get to it for no additional cost and managed to get the security guard stationed there to let us past. The beginning or our climb, therefore, began in a small village on a steep hill. The locals were very friendly. They weren't used to seeing foreigners. There is definitely an inverse relationship between how much people like tourists and how many they see.

After we left the village behind and wandered through some forest tracks (all alarmingly vertical) we came to the road that goes under the TeleferiQo and crawled under the wire fence to gain access. In your face booth lady person.

After following this road for a while we came to where it ended and the small tracks began and off we went. Have I mentioned how vertical these tracks were starting to get? About an hour from the top my lungs were burning and my heart was racing. Thankfully we found a 55 year old Brazillian climbing the mountain too so I altruistically volunteered to move at his pace. Eventually he turned back because he was getting dizzy from the thinner air and I was left to complete the now ridiculously vertical remaining part of the trek alone. Seriously, I was climbing at some points.

By the time I reached the top my lungs were fine but my legs burned like a thousand suns. I used what little Spanish I knew to find out where the girls were and went off to find them. Most the photos I'm posting are from the top. I'd like to show you my collection steadily climbing the mountain to show that this thing really is quite big but the upload speed constraints prevent me from doing so.

After eating the snacks we brought we began the descent. Y'know what direction is awesome? Down. Down is completely awesome. I could have run it save for the bits where we basically slid our way. Going down made us wonder how we got up at some places. Anyway, it took us four hours to climb it and only one hour to get down.

We chose to leave by passing the lady in the booth rather than going back through the village. Hah.