Altitude

Nothing much about Mike in this post I’m afraid.
Bob and I went for a little walk up one of the nearest of the hills that surround Huancayo. Jus t like the other times walking the hills here for me the problem isn’t tiredness but lack of oxygen. We got a taxi to the edge of the city and started up through the last houses, looking very strange to the locals I guess, and with a couple of rests made it into the fields. It was soon getting very hard and we had to walk a few minutes and then rest a few, tying to get our breaths back. The air here once you get out of the pollution of the city is very clear and so the mountains always look close. We spent the next hour or so apparently gaining a lot of height over the city without getting any nearer to the peak we intended to climb. Every time we stopped we could look back and see more and more of the city laid out below.



After a much struggle we made it out into the wild mountains and were ready for the lonely climb to the peak when we came across a village with families strolling around and for some reason carrying huge bundles of wood. Again we must have been a strange sight to them. We struck out again across more fields (Why put potato fields up here when there is plenty of valley below?) and fought our way apparently without oxygen up up again into the wilds where it started to rain and it looked like our day would be cut short. About now we got a phone call from Rocio asking where Mike’s immunisation records were. By this time it looked as if the quickest way off the mountain would be to go up a bit more and take a different ridge to go down, so we carried on a bit, very sad that all our pain and struggle would be in vain. As it turned out the rain never quite got going and we carried on up. We found a lonely road going towards the peak and small tree planting project, perhaps in progress perhaps abandoned. I took one baby tree in our bag with us as a reminder of our walk. As we gained more and more height of course we had less and less oxygen in the air and we were really struggling nearing the top. I particularly remember a small sheepfold that we rested on as soon as we reached it, and rested on at its far end too, perhaps 10 meters away as by then we couldn’t breathe again by then. The scramble up rocks to the summit was ridiculously hard taking a couple of steps and resting a couple of minutes and I really believe that had the mountain been even a bit taller we would not had made it.
At the top we ate cheese sandwiches with dried up cheese and had gulps of fruit juice, one of the most enjoyable meals I have ever had, and we planted my little tree right on the peak where one day it will grow to be the tree in the silliest most exposed spot of any tree in Peru.






The way down was a great relief we could walk and walk without stopping but any tiniest rise brought us to a halt and when we finally got home we were almost unable to get up the stairs.
Another fine day out I think.