Super Dooper High

So, I have a while here again, so I´m going to upload some more pictures. I haven´t taken many other than today, when I took quite a few. So first, here are a few from a few days ago.

This is the view from our dining room. There´s a nice little balcony where there are often hummingbirds and a nice view of the Northern part of the city.

I´m not sure if you can see this well, but to show Ecuador´s technological status, here is a BETA cassette player that´s in my room. Very classy.

This morning was pretty exciting. Benedicte and I decided to head over to the TeleferiQo, the big tourist attraction in Quito. The TeleferiQo is a multimillion dollar cable car that goes up the side of part of Ruca Pinchicha, a pretty sizeable mountain on the North side of Quito.

We arrived pretty early, to unknowingly beat the crowd, so we got basically right on the cable car. It´s a pretty nervewracking ride if you don´t like heights or rickety machinary. The ride takes about ten minutes and leaves you at a plateau about 80% of the way up Ruca Pinchicha. The altitude here is about 4100 meters, or about 13400 feet. It´s actually quite a noticable difference from Quito, which is about 2900 meters, or 9500 feet.

This is a shot from the start of the TeleferiQo. As you can see, Quito is already pretty far down!

Once we got to the top of the TeleferiQo, we sort of explored the area up there. It was really pretty already, but I wanted to explore the mountains some more than just the few minutes worth of trails that were inside the official TeleferiQo zone. So, we walked over to a barbed wire fence (which everyone seemed to be ignoring), and past the sign which warned that we were no longer under TeleferiQo security, and headed into the Andes.

We walked past a place where you could rent horses and there were still a good amount of people around us, so we felt pretty safe. We had heard some people talk about robberies happening up in the hills, so we were a little cautious.

After about a kilometer, it was just us, but the area was very open, so we still felt pretty comfortable. The trail was well walked but very steep at points. The added bonus of being 14000 feet up took a pretty serious tole on our staminas. We stopped to rest every few minutes.

One thing that was really cool to see were the airplanes taking off from the Quito airport. Keep in mind that Quito is 2900 meters above sea level, and the planes coming into the city were a good ways BELOW us. It was quite something.

Here I about a kilometer before we turned around. This was one of the only times you could see the top of the Volcan as it is usually surrounded by clouds.

Eventually we came to the crest of a hill and saw a person just sort of sitting there and looking a bit sketchy, so we decided to head back. At this point, though, we were probably about 85% of the way up the trail to the summit of Guagua Pinchincha, so I would estimate that we climbed about 1000 meters.

Here is my flatmate, Benedicte, near the top of Guagua Pinchincha. It was pretty high up!

The walk back down was, needless to say, a lot easier. We took the TeleferiQo back to Quito and that was that. All in all, it was a very tiring experience.

Lunch and some relaxing and then I willed my legs to take me for a run. I ran the same loop I have run now for the past five days (down to the Parque Carolína and back). I felt surprisingly good (maybe all the time up at that higher altitude did me some good?), so I did a bit of fast running to test out my lungs and legs. I ran nice and easy down to the Park and then did two pretty quick miles around the park (around 6:20 and 6:10). Again, I think the rule of 60-90 seconds per mile slower than effor applies here because I felt like I was running more like 5:00 effort.

Now, I´m in the internet cafe down the street and I think I may go buy a whole loaf of bread to refuel from all of the calories I´ve burned today! Wahoo!