Friday, July 24, 2009

Cotopaxi

Yesterday, our main adventure was Cotopaxi. We started from Latacunga after seeing the town a little bit and found the park by 1 pm. There is a semi decent dirt road that leads into the park from the south.



The park really doesn't have a whole lot to do. There is a museum as the first stopping point, a lagoon, and of course the major attraction is the volcano, which is a gigantic feature on the seemingly flat area that surrounds it. The volcano extended into the clouds at first but later in the day we caught a couple of glimpses of the top, full of ice and snow. You can take a car to a very high point on the mountain where many tourists start their climb to the top. I opted for a shorter version which was about 45 minutes of walking to a refuge on the mountain where people usually spend the night to get aclimatized. Since the mountain is so high, the second that you start moving, you start breathing like you almost just drowned. That made it a very hard hike but the view from the top was amazing. You can see the whole valley below and the long dirt road down.


On the way out of the park, we took the northern entrance which was pretty crazy. It was about 2 hours of a pretty terrible dirt road, made a little more precarious by the fact that our Chevy Spark had about 4 inches of clearance. There was one point where there was a gap in the road and two small wooden planks used to get cars across, but they were washed out and had a curb of about a foot or so to get onto them. We built a ramp out of rocks to get onto the boards so that we could get over the gap. At this point in the trip, we had already done 30 km on the dirt road so there was no turning back. We had to forge forward, not knowing what to expect. Luckily, everything else was less precarious.

No comments:

Post a Comment