Teacher on Two Wheels

Above: The edge of Huaytapallana Glacier, 4,700 meters (15,420 feet) above sea level

Sunday 7/27/08 Huancayo, Peru

Yesterday I went to visit Huaytapallana Glacier.  For six hard hours, I hiked with other hikers and fought to pull oxygen from the thin, crisp air.  I was surrounded by scenery that was absolutely breathtaking. I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

Above: Me in front of one of Huaytapallana’s lakes

Above: Huaytapallana Glacier, Peru

Above: Me in front of the glacier

Above: Blue skies and a stone sculpture two hours into the hike

Like all glaciers around the world, Huaytapallana is not the glacier it once was. A warming atmosphere is shrinking Huaytapallana’s mass more and more with each passing year. The present size of the glacier left me standing in awe, speechless, but our guide was quick to bring my head out of the snowy clouds and back down to earth.

“You should have seen this glacier ten years ago. Much bigger. Very very big,” he said casually as he looked down and inspected the straps to his backpack.

With the shrinking glacier towering over me, with its slowly filling lakes below me, I was reminded once again of one of the benefits of bicycle touring–its gasoline-less nature. Traveling by bike leaves only a thin tire track through the dust instead of a greasy, high-octane footprint on the planet.

Traveling for a few years around the world by bus, train, or plane is simply not fair to glaciers like Huaytapallana.

*****

After an hour and a half of difficult climbing, when all 30 of us finally reached the first mirador that afforded hikers a view of the glacier, we stopped to pay our respects to the mountain. In a ceremony that strangely involved cigarettes, grain alcohol, and coca leaves, our guide explained why the mountain is such a sacred place. I, like most of the foreigners, passed on the cigarettes and grain alcohol (smoking or drinking at an altitude that leaves you breathless just doesn’t seem right). Because most of us didn’t partake in the alcohol, the guide was left with lots of it in his two small plastic bottles. This, as it turned out, was a problem.

*****

At 4:30 p.m. all of the hikers had made it back to the bus with the exception of two college girls, one mother in her 50s, and the guide. So, we did what you do in those types of situations, situations that are beyond your control: nothing. We waited. And waited. And waited. We looked up at the mountain and watched it get swallowed up by a foggy blur of storm clouds. And we waited some more.

Above: View from the start of the hike. Click once and then click ‘All Sizes’ for more detail.

After an hour, a British guy three seats in front of me shouted out like a sailor spotting land, “I see an orange coat!! It’s Alex! Up there on the bluff!”

Above: Our ‘guide’ Alex

We all followed his outstretched arm and pointed finger and spotted Alex, our guide, a few hundred meters up the trail. As he got closer, we noticed that he was staggering and having difficulty walking. We noticed that every few paces the college girls and the mother had to nudge him back onto the trail so he didn’t slip off it.

One of the college girls burst onto the bus a few minutes later.

“Alex is dead drunk!” she screamed out to all of us. “He drank all of the cane juice that was left over after the ceremony! All of it! We kept getting lost because of him. He was falling all over the place, telling us to turn right, left, then right again. He had no idea where he was going! At one point, when the snow was really comin’ down and we were obviously lost, I got frustrated and asked him where we should go. He just said ‘Down’. This is crazy!”

Some people on the bus were laughing. Others started whispering about demanding their money back. Alex didn’t say much of anything. He just slumped over on his little plastic stool that sat in the aisle of the bus.

For the entire two hour ride home, four passengers needed to hold parts of his jacket to keep him from falling to the ground.

Above: Me, catching my breath, on the hike back down