Adventures of a Sun Seeker: Day 16: The Zenith (with labor)

Each step forward needed a huge bite of air. I needed to learn to accept the panting and just move onward. I reminded myself, I'm in the Andes! We were doing the final day of our three-day hike, with the grand prize of reaching the sunken caldera, the lake of Quilotoa.

Walking up through sand at 12,000 feet elevation felt like one of those dreams where you try to run but it's like moving through water. And indeed it felt like a dream up there, with the clouds drifting among the craggy topography. I had just enough air to tell Elise, "we're climbing up a collapsed volcano!" I tried taking long slow steps; I tried taking small staccato steps. No difference, I still felt like I was 100 years old. But this was also wonderful, to apply myself so fully to one single incredibly challenging thing. Up the sandy slope we climbed. The scenery was stunning, we were high enough now we could turn around and see stretched behind us all the terrain we had traversed on our days of walking. Sweeping views are almost always delicious, but to feel the sense of participation within them, and the immense energy spent, and the sense of claim, that was truly incredible.

After hours of hiking up, of heavy feet, of labored breathing, we saw the trail cresting at what was the end of the world, but was actually the steep drop into the lake below. We walked side by side, wanting to see it at the same moment. Arriving at the rim, it was like a whole orchestra surged with sound when we saw the huge bowl of teal water suddenly exposed below us. My whole vision was taken with this huge spread. I felt like laughing and crying and collapsing all at the same time. Instead, I sat down and began eating all the food I had in my backpack.

The hostel dinner last night had been bland at best, and after emptying by degrees a black pepper container over it (which was shaped like a flower), I gave up and put the flaccid pasta in a bag for either a trail dog or my trail self. At the top of this hike, after such enormous effort of climbing with low-concentrate oxygen, I ate that pasta and it was, inconceivably, the best pasta I have ever enjoyed. And I don't even like pasta.

I looked over at Elise. "The only thing I haven't eaten out of my bag is my sunscreen" she observed. I opened the bag of silly cookies from my Jet Blue flight, which I had carried this whole trip. "They go well with coffee," I said, handing her some and indicating my little to-go mug of hostel coffee. "Right now everything is going well with everything," she said.

What feeding! What elation! The color of the lake deep below was a teal not often found in nature; the color comes from minerals from the volcano. We continued our climb along the rim, perched on a thin raised trail not for the heights-afeared, finding a biome of plants adapted to cold windy desolate conditions. These had us exclaiming and stopping in delight: purple lupines and some pink snap-dragon-like flowers, some orange pine-coney explosions on a plant with spikey miniature leaves, looking stoic and invincible. It was thousands of feet below that big gorda leaves like bananas could manage.

We finished the hike--the culmination and zenith of my trip--hungry, damp, dirty, tired, smelly, and hairy. Especially in comparison with the shiny new tourists walking the opposite direction just beginning their trek. But how great did we feel. I had been worried about the elevation--but it was just a lot of breathing, no headaches or dizziness--and I had been worried about nasty rural dogs--but there were no attacks. We'd been worried about getting lost, but the signage was great, and a new app, Wikiloc, helped a lot with gps navigation.

Arriving back in a bigger city after bussing down from the caldera felt overwhelming, especially since we were hungry enough to eat our sunscreen and Carnival (the celebration before Lent begins) was in full force. People were dressed in their finest, a peacock feather in the traditional hat of an indigenous girl, dangly earrings, shined shoes. And kids ran around spraying each other with water guns and throwing paint powder on each other. Vendors sold brightly colored spray cans that shot some sort of white foam. Families posted at upper windows with water guns and soaked taxis below. I moved through this playful mess with ambivalence, assuming I was immune as a tourist. Then: SLAM. Something punched me, hard, in the back of my neck and suddenly my back was wet. When was the last time I was hit with a water balloon? A group of boys behind me laughed. I didn't like it, but my motto here: when I don't like something it makes a better story. So I got some Ecuadorian Carnival after all.