In general, I am a planner. I love a good checklist, I remember when I have made plans with friends weeks in advance, and I regularly check out my retirement savings progress. I find that researching and planning a vacation ahead of time is a huge part of the pleasure of the trip itself (anticipation is a wonderful thing).
But when it came to really making the leap to a 6 month trip, it was clear that it couldn't be planned. There was so much coordinating and organizing to be done to get us out of Austin that there wasn't much more I could do other than occasionally skim a page in our Lonely Planet South American book. We had two weeks of Spanish classes in Quito set up and our Machu Picchu trip in September booked. And that was it.
The best part of travel for me is being reminded about all that is out there that is different than my very small little life. In addition to being fun, confusing, exciting, delicious, and beautiful, seeing the world helps me grow a bit more as a person every time I head out of town. Taking on a trip this big for me came with the hope that I would let go of some more neuroses and get a little bit better at embracing the unknown and the serendipitous in life.
On Sunday, we took the Teleferiqo (a cable car/funicular) halfway up a dormant volcano on the west side of Quito called Rucu Pichincha. We had been told that it was a few hour hike from that point up to the top of the mountain, and even though we wore our hiking boots we were still pretty unprepared for the challenge of getting to the summit. The peak is at an altitude of 15,000 feet and so as we climbed further and further up we found ourselves having to stop every 5-10 minutes to catch our breath. But the views kept getting better, the plants kept changing and getting more interesting, and the top was in sight so we kept going.
3 long hours later we just about reached the summit when a huge bank of clouds rolled in and limited our visibility and we decided to turn around (and frankly, I was exhausted and we had run out of water). And we hiked 2 hours back down.
In addition to the peace I felt way up there surveying the city, I also had one of my first tastes of how quickly people start to bond when traveling and experiencing things together. On our way up we chatted with a few different groups of travelers, including a group of 3 young American women who had a friend that had gone on ahead to the peak while they hung back. They'd been waiting for her a while and were getting worried and so we headed upwards with instructions to look for a "blonde girl with a green backpack". On the way we chatted with an Australian couple, a couple of French guys, lots of local Eucadorian families out for a Sunday hike, and an American horticulturist who was collecting seed and plant samples to try to propagate in Seattle, all of whom were keeping an eye out for this missing young woman.
When she turned up a few hours later (she'd made it to the peak in her Chaco sandals as you do when you're 22 years old) there was some general rejoicing. As the group ended at the cable car around the same time, we gathered for a group photo and exchanged names to find each other on Facebook. Then we split a taxi with 3 strangers/new friends and took our tired legs home.
That energy has stayed with me this week, as I've continued to meet new people at our hostel and in school and we've started to scheme where our next stops will be after Quito. Suddenly, I've got friends in New Zealand, and we've got plans to hike around a volcanic crater lake with a woman from the US who went to college with someone I went to high school with (because the world really is that small). Rolling with it feels pretty amazing thus far.
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