And We Are Eight

Jeff got in Wednesday. To celebrate we were going to push him into a riot, but the next one wasn't scheduled for two weeks. We instead decided to push him up a mountain. Thin air makes it hard to breath, which is kinda like being tear gassed. But all of the serious mountains were too far away and we wanted to be back by the evening. None of us had packed lunches, either. We found a sufficiently small and close mountain in one of the nearby parks. More like a hill, really. I'm calling it a mountain so I can say we climbed a mountain. I'll stop once we scale a real mountain.

The gang of eight. Back row, left to right: Arthur, Alex, Brian, Jeff. Front row: Malus, Tito, Peter. Behind the camera: me. It's two anna half miles to the national park. We start walking, and I take a picture of our target along the way.

Eventually we find a hole in the fence and get off the path. We find a river that follows along the trail. We all ooh and aah at it, with the exception of Arthur and Peter who stay back. Alex suggests we go down there, at which point we point out it's a twenty foot drop. The only way to get there would be to hit one patch of dirt and slide all the way down, something way too insane to-

Damn you, Alex.

Malus and Tito take the same route, while Brian follows a slightly safer one. Not wanting to risk death (and being kinda a coward), I leave and get pictures of cacti.

Hmm, there's something behind this one. I look behind and find another path. This one is trades a single steep fall for a lot of complicated ones. There's a ton of trees and brambles in the way that could cut my arms and face up if I'm not careful. But I can control my fall and use my hands as breaks, so I don't mind. In two minutes I'm down by the river. Success!

We hop across the river stones and climb the other cliff. Another halfmile and we swing back down across and up along the proper road. We rejoin the other three guys at the gate to the national park, and head in.

At the start it's more of the same. We pass a statue of the Virgin Mary and cross a bridge. Everybody tries to go under the bridge and hop across the rocks, but only a few make it. The rest of us just take the path for once.

Then we begin the climb. First it's steps, doing a good half hour on a heavy stairmaster. The path always isn't in good condition, and with eight of us it's not the fastest going. At a couple of points we stop for pictures.

Finally we reach the top of the path. Past there it's rocks and brush and more rocks. No stairs, only sand. We press ahead. At some point Peter stays behind, sitting on a jut in the cliff. We all get separated, until even my shouts go unanswered. Finally, pulling myself up one last rock, I reach a plateau. Here I get the bulk of my pictures. I tried to find the absolute best ones to upload here. It's still going to be a long, long image dump.

There's still more to climb. Too much brush and cover, not enough extra height. There's no photographic reason to go on, only for the sake of getting higher. So I continue. Camera tucked back in pocket, I spend another half hour pushing myself ahead. At some point, according to Brian, the air got detectably thinner. I never notice. More climbing. I hit a long patch of brambles and have to slide on my belly to get past them. At some point I meet up with Arthur again, who had to do the same. I'd love to say that we reached the peak, but eventually we heard Peter call that we should come down and the other guys, up above, shout back the same. So we all head back and meet up (down?) with Peter.

Well, going down is gonna be a lot easier than coming up. But we are manly men who don't want things 'easy'. How can we make the descent manlier?

Running.

I wish I had gotten a pic of this, but 1) it would have come out all blurry, and 2) when you're jogging down a bendy unkempt mountain trail the last thing you want to do is distract yourself with a camera. People start falling behind or switched to walking or whatever and by the time we get back to the park gates only three of us are left. Looks like all that exercise paid off after all. We walk the four kilos back to the bus station just in time to catch it leaving. And so our time atop the world is at an end. Hopefully soon it will be dwarfed when we really punch through the sky. I'm looking forward to it.

In the meantime, I'm realizing that all of these posts about riots and trips and excitement don't actually give a good representation of what life here is like. I'm going to start working on a couple of more mundane posts soon to show where I work and how I get there and stuff. Until then!