Quill's Tour - Sliding down Volcano Villarica (with the runs)

Yeah, so the day before yesterday we climbed up this volcano called Villarica above Pucon. Pucon by the way means "entry to the mountains". Villarica is an active volcano, not dormant or dead or whatever. It last erupted in 1984. It is 2500 metres tall and dominates the town and its surroundings. Wherever you are, from whatever angle its always there in your face, looking down at you, challenging you to climb it.

We set out at 7am. It takes out five hours to climb the thing. You get a chair lift up for a small bit of the way and then the ascent starts. The chair lift by the way had no bar. At some point on the chair lift I realised that I had a bit of an upset stomach, nothing too serious at this point but I remembered how the waitress the previous day had poured some local water into my fruit juice.

This volcano is basically completely covered in snow and you have to wear ski boots and clampons (iron spikes) to climb the thing. Its too steep to climb directly so you have to traverse it. You have an ice pick as well to support you and help you from falling back down into Pucon. About half way up the climb starts getting steeper, the altitude higher (so you start getting headaches) and the weather colder, meanwhile my stomach problem is developing into an issue and I realise that I´m not going to have any control over it. Funilly enough they don´t have any rest-rooms on the sides of snow-capped blizzard-ridden volcanos. I´ve explained my problem to the guide and come to the conclusion that I´ve got three options.

Option A is to walk back down and give up doing the volcano.

Option B which the guide suggested was to just dig a quick hole with the ice pick and go to the toilet on the side of the slope in front of everyone! "Oh don´t worry" the guide said "everyone will just be looking at the view". Bear in mind that our party is not the only party of people on the slope, and that there are no rocks, trees... nowhere to hide basically, just an open white slope. It´d be like going to the toilet whilst sk-iing on an big wide red run. Taking your jacket and gloves off in blizzard conditions, undoing your braces, pulling down both sets of trousers, and just squating, balls swinging above the snow on an almost vertical mountain...

With that in mind I went for Option C.

Its a tough repetitive trudging climb up snow, because there´s no variation, everything is just smooth and steep... you can see where you have to get to, and the summit doesn´t seem to get any closer. I wasn´t able to have anything to eat or drink either (what goes in, must come out), so I had no energy and hardly any water! It was a lonely business as well, with only the occassional warm flurry for company.

Now I know how Rums felt that time at the Carnival. Its probably my bad karma for not helping him to the khazis.

When we got to top it was spectacular. You look over the edge and can see right inside this volcano (no lava though - not that time of the year). You see two other smoking volcanos from the top, and well as lakes, forests, towns... everyone is looking at all this whilst I´m plugging myself up.

But in all seriousness I was enjoying it up there... the guide was shaking our hands and congratulating us.

Then comes the fun part. The way that you get down this volcano is by "luge-ing" down, ie sliding down snow paths on your backside, so off we go. Actually I was a bit nervous about it for a couple of reasons. Kieran had also told me a horror story about when he did it and saw the worman who went before him at the bottom, with broken leg jutting out at right angles! Anyway this time the snow wasn´t as compact and we didn´t speed down. Also the cold from the snow kind of cancelled out the warm inside my trousers, and gives me the illusion that everything was ok. Anyhow we made it down at about 6pm. Becky said that climbing the volcano was the hardest thing she´d ever done.

yesterday we went white water rafting, which was the business. Far better than the previous time we´d done in it in Sri Lanka. That time we did grade 2 (beginner), this time was grade 3-4 (intermediate). Now I know what the fuss is about... good rush. I hear Queenstown, NZ and Tasmania are really good for it. Any other sugestions from rafting geeks (rich?) would be welcome. After the rafting we had some Pisco Sour that the guide had bought and then sat in some hot springs till midnight drinking the local beer, Cristal, out of cold litre bottles, nice and relaxing.

Pisco Sour by the way is a decent drink (a lot better than it sounds!). Its the local drink here. It consists of Chilean white brandy (called Pisco), mixed with lemon juice and sugar, like a Side Car cocktail in England/ US. Just my kind of drink. They make them nice and strong across the road in the Mamas and Tapas bar.

Today we are chilling out with an aussie called Brett who did the rafting and springs with us. Tonight we catch overnight bus to Santiago. And on wednesday morning at 7am we fly to Lima. We do the Inca Trail on the 7th November.