Huayna Potosi // 18th Mar 2005

Hi everyone

Yes, it's a big one again. Sorry. Brief week summary to save time: Alive and well. Climbed a big mountain. Going to Macchu Picchu tomorrow for a week. Have a fantastic Bolivian girlfriend.

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On Monday morning I set out in a battered old Toyota with a driver, and my guide Teo, for Mount Huayna Potosi (6088m). Our driver was intent on getting my adrenaline rushing prior to any real activity by overtaking unnecessarily on as many blind corners as possible, only to slow down andf irritate the driver behind immediately afterwards. In our rickety silver car (coffin?), we followed the La Paz highways up to fastest growing city, Alto (population 900,000). This is an ugly place, industrialised and shabby, based around a somewhat unthrilling cement industry, and has countless abandoned railway lines that are now the home of stray dogs and fresh juice vendors. Its only semi-redeeming feature is the odd cobbled street. To give you an idea of how unhospitable this city is, it's not even reviewed in Lonely Planet, even though is something like the fourth largest city in the country. We passed a road where almost every building is a barbers shop, and they all cut hair into standard Bolivian styles for the same price of B$2.50 (that's 31 pence to you and me). Wierd.

After Alto was in our rear view mirror, the countryside quickly opened up. It's surprising how much like the Devonshire moors the Bolivian highland plains look. They're just a bit higher up, hillier and incredibly windy. And the people don't tend to talk with a strong west-country accent. We passed countless llama and sheep herders standing or sitting around aimlessly while their livestock grazed quietly on the desolate wasteland. It must be a lonely life being a Bolivian llama herder – not one of the shepherds had another person anywhere nearby, and I doubt the animals are great conversationalists. We passed miles of picturesque nothingness, interspersed with electricity pylons and shacks set back off the road, before we entered a series of valleys with lakes, rivers, a distinctive lack of trees and lots of lage rocks. Occasionally there would be an abandoned factory to glare at, alongside a large patch of now depleated land. Sometimes there would be a sheer drop on one side that raised the blood pressure to above the level of a stressed executive, aided in this feat by the driver sticking his head out of the window to admire the view.

Speaking of motoring, the Bolivian driving style is one that would be hard to emulate, and I'm not sure you'd really want to. It's typical of the laid-back nature the whole country has. No one drives particularly fast (unless they're in the country and the roads are nice and dangerous); people stop all over the road suddenly and without warning; nobody bothers with such nuisances as indicating or seatbelts. At rush hour in La Paz, military-style policemen have the job of standing in the middle of the road and waving their hands at cars and buses in order to duplicate the job the traffic lights are already doing, but most of the time not paying any attention to what the lights are saying. Needless to say, with two conflicting messages the drivers often just ignore one or both, and the roads become solidly gridocked for a good hour each evening.

Back to the mountain... my method of choosing the company to do the climb with was remarkably simple; after hearing people rave about the climb the night before, I went to the only company that was open on a Sunday and could wedge me in the next day. I didn't have a chance to check reputations with other people, but fortunately it all turned out just fine. The guy who ran 'Adolfo Andinos' (whose name I presume to be Adolfo) spoke good English and was friendly and reassuring. I was sold.

I guess Adolfo's been established for quite a while – he's got a groovy 70's Alpine-style logo, and the kit was well-used and incredibly uncool. Not that it mattered – I didn't encounter anybody who shunned me due to my yellow and blue (and in places fixed with duck tape) snowsuit. The best part of the kit were the crampons. I've always wondered why they aren't used more in gang warfare – you could do a serious amount of damage with large metal spikes strapped to your boots...

The first day was spent preparing our stuff for the next day, and practicing climbing a glacier. I'd never been on a glacier before, and it was something I would describe aspretty cool. From a distance it looked like rock, but close up it was more like the wobbly fibreglass set of an early Star Trek episode. There was a constant crystalline sound of small fragments of ice breaking off in the sunight and tumbling down to stick somewhere else lower down, and sometimes you'd hear the disconcerting sound of a river flowing below the ice you're standing on. The techniques for climbing nearly vertical walls of ice didn't take too long to get to grips with, and within a couple of hours Teo was apparently satisfied with my competence, so we set back to the base camp.

Instead of sleeping in tents that night, Teo suggested we talk to his friend who maintains the hydroelectric dam that runs from the glacier's run-off. Slipping him the princely sum of ten boliviernos (there are fourteen of these to the English pound), I was granted use of the spare room for the night. The dam-keeper was chuffed to be paid so much, and proudly showed me around his house, from his living room (complete with handwritten label pinned to the wall saying 'Living Room' in both English and Spanish), to the large ugly TV and stereo he had recently bought, and the bathroom I wasn't allowed to use. The night was nevertheless pleasantly spent on a thin mattress, in a heated room – which was pure luxury since I haven't had one of these since arriving in South America. Actually, this hasn't been a problem since most of the time it's been hot, but the mountains are quite nippy. I awoke in the morning to pack the last of the gear and don my mountainclimbing fashionwear.

Breakfast consisted of La Paz's bread with cheap and nasty condiments, and a couple of cups of tea. The people of La Paz are proud of the fact that they have a bread exclusive to their city; other people can easily see why the hard, incredibly chewy rolls haven't caught on anywhere else. I think its only redeeming quality is that it seemingly keeps forever – not that you could tell if it was stale anyway. Combined, the hard bread with sickly sweet jam and tea with powdered milk transprted my mind about 7000 miles away, to the romance of an M1 service station.

The climb was challenging, hard work requiring a Snickers bar (which was exactly the same as in the UK but without anyone complaining about it really being called a 'Marathon') and lots of water. Somehow Teo managed to pick out the route, amazing given that half of it was over unstable randomly fallen rocks with no real path. The mountain's scenery changed every time we turned a corner, going from reeds and blackish-red rocks to grey soil and glacier runoff water to an enormous stack of squared-off rocks, on top of which was the base camp. Actually there were loads more stages than that, but they'd get a little boring to read.

Most of the time we were walking along ridges, where the ground is more stable. Occasionally my large backpack would reak havoc on my sense of balance, or the topsoil would shift, and just as I corrected myself I'd take a look down, where there would be a massive rocky drop and potentially the bloody pulp of my body at teh bottom. Every time this happened, I was reminded of the contract I'd had to sign just as we set off saying that Adolfo was not responsable for any injury or death that should occur whilst partaking in this activity.

At one point we stopped in a valley for a rest, and there was absolute silence. You don't know silence until you have heard silence like this. The only sounds were the occasional breeze ruffling my hair and my own (admittedly quite heavy by that stage) breathing. In the distance were three black mountains next to each other, which somehow looked exactly like the Led Zeppelin song 'Black Knight'. Every time I looked east, that riff leapt into my head.

We got to the second campsite, which was on top of the rockiest part of the mountain and set up our tents owhere it was oh-so-comfortable. Teo cooked dinner, which was hard to eat due to the altitude, and I talked to the other guys with another group who had arrived a little earlier. They were a group of five plus three guides; I felt quite lucky to have a guide all to myself. All being knackered from the day's climb, and with an early start the next day, we went to bed at about 5.30pm. Thanks to I-don't-know-what (probably altitude), I didn't sleep half as much as I would have liked.

At 11.30pm, I was awoken by Teo with a boiling kettle for tea and some more un-appetising La Paz bread. I had another motorway service station style breakfast, plus a chocolate bar for energy, and blearily made my way to the start of the mountain's snow. Tied to Teo like a dog on a leash, we set off up the hill. Only about 900m to climb; we'd done about 500 the day before. Sounds easy on paper, but with freezing snow, heavy ice cold wind blowing against my face, numb fingers and toes, extreme tiredness and the constant question 'What am I doing this for?' running round my mind, it was a challenge. The highest peak we could see for the first half of the journey looked miles off, and wasn't even the real summit – this was hidden somewhere behind it. Climbing that mountain early in the morning was the biggest test of both my physical and mental endurance I've ever had. After five and a half hours of climbing, with rests every few metres (much to Teo's annoyance), having taken my last paracetamol for a headache, and exhausted the supply of chocolates and with the bottle of water I had literally frozen solid, we were within 200m of the peak – that is, 200m of about 75 degrees gradient. Being able to see the peak spurred me on and about an exhausting hour of ice-picking later we were at the summit.

The feeling once I was there, after so much self doubt, was fantastic. It was almost unreal to be at the top of the mountain, with a 360° view of the Andes, and half an hour until sunrise. The first group of two guys had arrived about half an hour before me, and were patiently freezing to the hillside while sky turned ever more orange. Huayna Potosi is the highest mountain for quite a distance around, so we were able to look down on the other mountains and clouds below us. We could see Lake Titicaca (the world's highest navigable lake, about 50 miles away) in the distance, plus the shimmering nightime lights of Alto apparently being eaten by a large cloud. It was like being in a plane, but without the cramped seats, air hostesses, motion, etc, and the view not limited by a tiny three-inch window. The sunrise was pretty spectacular, with the colour of the snow below us changing from a light blue at night to a golden orange, and everything slowly lightening up in that way that it does when the sun goes up.

There's nothing amazing about the mountain's peak itself, really. Don't get me wrong, it felt amazing to have got there, but at the end of the day a summit is just like the rest of the mountain, only with nothing above it. I don't know what I was expecting. The very top was a thin lip of snow, under which was a sheer drop too large to be able to be survived. One side of the mountain just disappeared below us.

Once we'd seen the sunrise, we started to descend. This was a lot more fun than the ascent, until the altitude sickness cut in. After the initial fun of running 200 metres down the 75° slope tied to the other guys, I was collapsing every few metres – one of the symptoms of altitude sickness is the loss of sense of balance, plus a splitting headache and the inability to think straight. Teo kept encouraging me to continue, which I can now see the sense in – the quicker you descend, the quicker the sickness goes away – and giving me useful Bolivian tips such as 'Look, here's my head in exchange for yours. Now you're alright' – which I still can't see any sense in. At the time, it was a real temptaion to place my ice pick between his eyeballs. Although I felt awful, it was incredible to see the distance we'd covered, and we got back to the second camp in only a fraction of the tieme it had taken to reach the summit. Thank goodness for gravity.

On arrival at the second camp, disaster struck. I fell over in the snow thanks to lack of balance, and the lovely three-pound sunglasses I bought in Manaus flew into the ricks and the lenses scratched nicely. Fortunately I'm in Bolivia, which unless I am mistaken is internationally renound as one of the world's finest manufacturer of tinted lenses, available from the markets for a sum no greater thatn the cost of a slice of cake.

Eventually I was all the way down, the altitude sickness went away and I was driven back to my hotel where I slept for an epic amount of time. The weather took its toll on my poor skin, though, as my face is looking increasingly like the po-faced older indigenous women.

Other news then... not much to report other than I've aquired myself a lovely Bolivian girl, a 24-year old anthropology student called Eliana. I leave here for Cuzco in Peru tomorrow, to do the Inca Trail to Macchu Picchu. Then I'm coming back here to meet up again with the lass, and cycle down the world's most dangerous road. And after that - I'm not entirely decided yet, but so far I've made good time on the travelling, so can afford to be indecisive.

Hope all's well back on the Home Front. Keep me updated with things, and stuff, if possible.

Ollie