Route of the Volcanoes - 2nd instalment

Arrived in Riobamba 20 September and hit the ground running. Managed to find the best hotel in town, a fact I discovered after checking in ....

I got myself on a tour of Chimborazo, an inactive volcano with the highest summit at 6,310m, it is the closest point on the Earth to the sun and also the furthest point away from the centre Earth.

I will give you time to digest all that...

The morning was great and started with a hike up to 5000m (never been so high in my life...) and then a bike ride off the volcano. I´m not really sure how to describe the bike ride, apart from nerve wracking...the ground was gravelly and loose but equally with rocks scattered here and there. Maybe tricky is a good word to use. At that altitude it was chilly and with the constant braking my hands took up a semi permanent curl, not unlike a neanderthal hand...

The day got warmer as it wore on and as we descended and buttterflies and hummingbirds came out to play... the trail became more compact and it started to become fun.

I could tell my tour buddies were a little disappointed with the cloud cover, that prevented us from seeing the summit...when you don´t speak a lot of Spanish you get good at reading faces.

Anyway by some miracle the clouds lifted for 2 minutes and they both shouted something which made no sense to me, but they were so chuffed with being able to see the top of the volcano. All this would have been okay except for the fact that they insisted on doing this every time the cloud lifted, which was on and off for about 7 more times that afternoon and everytime we had to stop and they all burbled about peaks and snow for ten minutes. I had to fight the urge to beat them to death with the toothpick on my swiss army knife (I know it has a blade, but my kind of justice dictated a slow death)!

By this time we had been going for about 6 hours and there were still pre-Inca ruins to be seen, (really just some rocks that the volcano may or may not have chucked out), a silvermine (a hole in the ground) and another hour to get back to Riobamaba...

It has been said that I am no Michael Palin.

Despite all this the guide showed us a natural mountain spring that we could drink from, straight from the ground. That was cool, I never thought that it would be possible in this day to drink straight from the ground, humans being disgraceful creatures and fouling up most things.