Cotopaxi NP

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After one week of Spanish I was ready to practice ... thanks to my hands, fingers and fantasies I managed to get to the Cotopaxi NP. My Spanish helped not really since I hardly can remember anything ;-) I am soooooo not a language talent ...

Anyway, I took the bus from Quito to the entrance of the Cotopaxi National Park and 1 1/2 hours and $1 later I was there ... in the middle of nowhere ;-)

Cotopaxi is a Volcano and it´s altitude is 5897m. Mostly it is hidden behind clouds and that was the case when I arrived. Optimistic me, I took a taxi into the park anyway (yes, you have to take a taxi to get inside the park and let me tell you, that is not the cheapest thing to do .... the entrance fee is $10 and when we wanted to go to the parking lot (from there you can do nice hikes), the road was closed due really bad weather (a huge thunderstrom just appeared) and we had to turn around. So I stayed in Lasso (a mini town near the national park) and visited a super mini craft market there. Found a little Hostel and stayed there for the night.

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Next moring I got up early and saw a ¨ok¨sunrise just behind the Cotopaxi - at least there where no clouds. I spend money for the taxi again (didn´t get cheaper ...) and this time I was able to get to the parking lot, which was just in the clouds (it is amazing how fast the clouds just appeared). There was a ¨little¨ hike up to a shelter. According to the taxi driver it would take around 1 hour. So I thought that shouldn´t be a problem and I started to hike up there. On my way up there I met three really nice persons: A girl from Brazil (Luana), a guy from Australia (Ben) and Max from Munich. It was really cold and windy up there and on the side of the trail we found more and more snow. But the worst was the really thin air - even we just climbed an altitude of approx. 300m it was soooooooo exhausting ...  Finally at the shelter (4500m - took really almost an hour) we got a warm chocolate (was the best one I ever had - I swore ;-) ...). There is a possibility to hike to the summit, but unfortunately (of course, what else) I didn´t have enough time to do that. Plus you need special equipment like spikes, pikes and so on and I really was fine with not being a hero :-)

My three new friends offered me to take me back to Quito since they rented a taxi all the way to Quito. That way I saved a lot of money and has a great time riding back with them. Even the really sad moment of running over a dog (he just appeared in front of our car) had something funny ... Ben (the Australian guy) took a nap when it happen and because of the noise he woke up and his first comment was ¨Did we ran over a kangaroo?¨ we just had to laugh, because for gods sake, we are in Ecuador!!!! And because of this event I learned that ¨to kill¨ is ¨matar¨ in Spanish.

That night we went out for dinner and I just went to bed around EIGHT PM ... I was soooo tired. Still no pictures . thanks Mary Sue, for your comment, but that I knew already and that wasn´t the problem. I cannot download my pictures directly from my camera because they are just too big. So I have to find a very simple way of downsizing them w/o downloading a program to the computer - any suggestions??

HELP!! I have a function on my camera to do that but for some reason it doesn´t work as well - shiiii................