To make up for, I don't want to call it a "failure", but somewhere in the range of not upwardly successful camping trip on Friday, Felix, Thomas, and I climbed a big rock on Monday. They call it a "hill", Hill Provincia, but they also call this more-than-5000-meter thing a hill too, so I'm just gonna call it a mountain. And what a mountain! (If it's not a fish story, it's not worth telling.) The last couple hours'll strain your calves nicely, but the first few should be fairly tranquil. That is if you aren't an adventurer. Adventurers don't need the path, they don't want it, and they don't realize when they aren't on it. Adventurers add 3 hours to the hike by scaling - actually rock climbing - the face and tightroping the bald ridges. They remove spines from cacti with their palms because if they don't do it, someone else will have to. They don't wear sunblock because the muscular burn of the climb isn't enough. They don't take pictures because even the batteries they carry can't keep up with their pace. They watch the condor straddle the wind because hunger drives them to hope it will land within Leatherman distance. They crunch through the snow at the top and resist the urge to melt it in their water bottles even after they run dry. Adventurers are the last ones to reach the summit, where they eat gomi bershen (not gummy bears), and even the night beats them to the bottom. Adventurers imagine what it would be like to be a colonial explorer, horsebacking it over the Andes, descending the hill-mountains, seeing at a distance this vast flat valley, gilded by the setting sun not obstructed by radio towers, enhanced by smog, or mirrored in myriad city lights, and thinking: This looks a strategic place for conquest, to bare a plaque with my name, to report to the King. Explorers are paid with cold heavy metals; adventurers pay themselves with the stories they tell long after the sunburn has peeled and the splinters dissolve in the inner layers of epidermis. Adventurers smile when someone asks them if it was failure or success.
Adventurers, those from Austria, actually do take photos and they post them at:
camping 1: http://picasaweb.google.at/Tom.Leitner/RegenwanderungReservaLircay?feat=email#
hiking: http://picasaweb.google.at/Tom.Leitner/12102009CerroProvincia?feat=email#
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Lastly, adventurers always tell their tales in the third person.
ReplyDeleteActually, I very much like your narrative voice in this post.
Glad you're having fun.