I joined a guided group and was unlucky to get paired with a bunch of obnoxious Israelis, but there was also nice older Japanese man and a young Australian guy that I got along swimmingly with. Israelis have a horrible reputation among backpackers for talking only Hebrew even if they know English and for being disruptive. They certainly lived up to it on this trip, talking ridiculously loudly for eight days straight. I'd never before encountered a group of people who could talk continuously for so long and often there was more than one of them talking at once.
The Japanese guy, a banker on the brink of retirement, mentioned that his uncle was a pilot in World War II who had been scheduled to go kamikaze the day after the war ended and that his mother lived 100km from Hiroshima, had seen the nuclear blast, and is still alive today, over 90 years old.
The Australian, Sebastian, was in South America primarily to do a three month retreat in which he would take the hallucinogen ayahuasca over 20 times. After experiencing psilocybin twice over the course of several months, I can't imagine going through that powerful and exhausting of an experience over 20 times in three months. It seems like too much to me, but Sebastian had already done two weeks worth and was going back for more.
Freezing cold temperatures at night were the norm throughout the eight days. The first night it snowed and sleeted and in the morning the tent was frozen stiff and the ground was so cold that I was hopping from one foot to the other to try and keep my toes from freezing. But once the sun cam out, things warmed up quickly. Sometimes we walked through snow and other times the trail was very boggy, which meant that our shoes were constantly getting wet and never seemed to dry during the nights. One night, Sebastian made the mistake of leaving his shoes outside the tent and in the morning they were frozen. One the coldest night, our waterbottles that were inside the tent froze.
Sebastian came down with a nasty cold on the very first day of the trip and it worsened everyday after that. I think the stress of the hike combined with the cold, sleepless nights wore his immune system down. In addition, he was also plagued by altitude sickness every time we went over a mountain pass. On the worst afternoon, he stumbled into camp looking like Lawrence of Arabia coming out of the desert, wobbling from side to side and then collapsing next to the tent, too exhausted to climb in.
While I wouldn't call it one of the best hikes in the world, it did have its high points. There was a spectacular viewpoint overlooking three colored lagoons and a beautiful walk through purple and yellow flowers to a spectacular valley, but the by far the best spot was Mirador San Antonio. It was the highest point of the hike, 5100m, and required a steep climb to reach. Luckily, Sebastian and I got there well before the Israelis. We both were profoundly moved by the sight and sat there in a silent awe for twenty minutes. It even brought me to tears.
After eight days of walking around the bottoms of the mountains, Sebastian and I decided we wanted to climb to some summits and ended up taking a five day mountaineering course that included climbing two mountains at the end, Vallanaraju (5686m) and Yanapaqcha (5460m). Our instructor/guide, Lucho, was a very competent, but impatient and almost peculiar man. If we didn't get something right the first time, he would get irritable and tell us that it was very easy. It didn't seem like we could do anything right. When I packed up my backpack to move to a new location, I invariably did it incorrectly and he would grab it from me and repack it. I couldn't even stuff my sleeping bag into it's sack correctly. Apparently, I was stuffing the wrong end in first. I've used crampons several times before and never had an issue with them, but this time they were of a different style that I found very difficult to put on. Lucho told me that the crampons weren't the problem, but rather I was the problem. I told him that I wasn't the problem, but rather he was the problem. I thought the whole thing was quite comical and I told him several times how he could improve his teaching, but he couldn't care less. Despite his irritations, we did learn quite a bit including various knots, arresting falls, crevasse rescues, belaying, ice climbing, and rappelling. I have belayed and rappelled before when rock climbing, but these systems were totally different. A special knot was used which removed the need for a belay device and the rappelling system was active-release rather than the normal active-break. The advantage being that if the person rappelling were knocked unconscious by falling rock or ice, he would hang there safely until he regained consciousness. With the traditional system he would instead immediately fall.
The climbs to the two summits both followed the typical pattern of climbing to base camp one afternoon, camping there and arising around midnight to hike to the top before the sun came out and made the snow and ice soft, arriving at the summit around sunrise. By this time, Sebastian's cold had migrated to deep in his chest and caused frequent horrific coughing spells. He was also battling altitude sickness, but somehow soldiered through it and made it to the first summit. However, he decided to bow out and not attempt the second summit the next day, so it was just me and Lucho. The second mountain was much more technical than the first, requiring ice climbing a wall directly above a large crevasse and then multiple rappels on the way down. Also, even before reaching the wall crevasses abounded throughout the climb. With only our headlamps to illuminate the landscape, it was slow going as we tried to choose a safe path through the virtual minefield. At one point, we walked over what was basically a balance beam of ice with crevasses on both sides.
About 45 minutes in, Lucho turned to me and yelled in a concerned tone that if he fell into a crevasse that I needed to arrest hard. We had already gone over this, so I understood. You see, climbers tie themselves together so that if one person falls, the other climbers can attempt to arrest the fall by digging their ice axes into the ground. Of course, the downside is that if the arrest fails, all the climbers will be dragged into the crevasse or off the cliff. You can see an example of this system in the beginning of the movie Seven Years in Tibet when Brad Pitt injures himself during a team arrest. Next, Lucho yelled that if there were an avalanche, I should "open the rope". I had no idea what that meant and I don't know why he waited until 2AM to tell me what to do in case of an avalanche. I yelled back over the howling wind that I didn't understand and Lucho tried to explain it to me five more times, but his English wasn't very good and I could barely hear him, a dark figure on the other side of 10m of rope, over the wind. I couldn't come closer to him because it would be dangerous to not have a slight tension in the rope between us. If one of us fell and there were slack in the rope, it would be more difficult to arrest. After the fifth time, I gave up and told him that I understood. I figured that if I hadn't gotten it the first five times, I wouldn't get it the next five either. Luckily, there were no avalanches. Unluckily, we never made it to the summit.
When we reached the infamous wall that makes this particular mountain so technical, the crevasse below it had widened making the normal route impossible. We spent the next hour trying to find another fairly safe way up it, but to no avail. The next safest spot looked very unstable to me. Lucho said that two years prior, an American guide had broken his neck and died when he tried to scale the wall in that spot and fell into the crevasse. So, we decided to turn back and climb another day. Lucho seemed embarrassed and said that he'd never before failed to make it to that summit. We were just barely short of it and therefore still got a great view for sunrise. The colors of the sky were wonderful bands of color. I'm afraid I didn't get any pictures of it or many pictures of the climbs in general because I was belaying for Lucho as he probed the wall. Even when I wasn't doing that, I had always be alert in case Lucho fell. When roped up, climbers have to rely deeply on one another. Any slip or lapse of concentration by one person could kill both. It was a bit disappointing not to make the summit, but there was no way I was going to risk my life climbing that crumbly wall of icicles and loose snow for a silly little peak.