Lara versus the Volcano: Round 2

So I hiked up the volcano again (Maderas, that is). There was a Canadian couple staying with my host family. They had bought some property in my community and were back to finalize papers. Next year they'll be back to start building a small house. They've known my host family for a while and always stay with them when they come visit. This visit they wanted to hike the volcano and I, of course, wanted to go with them.

We left about 7:00 am on a Sunday morning with my host brother Javier as a guide. It only took us 5 hours to get to the laguna. That is a little longer than it should have taken us. But we had some trouble along the way. After about an hour and a half into the hike I felt like I had no energy at all and was moving really sluggishly. This happened the last time I hiked the volcano too. I've never had problems like this hiking in the states or anywhere else. As we got higher and the temperature dropped a little bit I got my energy back and started moving a bit faster. It didn't help that Javier kept saying we were at the top only to find out that nope, we're not.

When we finally did get to the top of the volcano and started hiking down to the laguna the Canadian woman's shoe broke. She had a pair of flip-flops in her bag which she wore, but they kept coming apart too and so she basically walked bare-foot down to the bottom. It was pretty steep going down. But we made it. We walked along the laguna to a place free of tourists and sat down to enjoy the beautiful day and cloudless sky. Below are some photos from the laguna. We hung out for about an hour and then headed down.

Everything went fine on the way down. We saw some monkeys. Mostly we were quiet and tired and just hiked.

When we got to the house, I unfortunately started feeling bad: nauseas and my skin was really hot. It turned out to be not a very good evening. In the end, I think I had heat exhaustion. Either way, Round 2 goes to the volcano. But I'll get it next time.