View from the Summit

Wow, this has been an experience. One of the greatest ones ever I guess. I climbed the Chachani - a volcano that is just a little over 6km high. 6075m to be precise. In a two day approach me and 5 others of my group reached the peak. The first day we just did a little warm up and carried all the equipment from 5150m where the Jeeps dropped us off to 5400m where the base camp needed to be errected. After some sort of dinner everybody went to bed (tent) and tried to sleep at some degrees below zero. Nobody really slept. Tim, who claimed to have slept 1 hour while we had our breakfast at 1:30am was envied by the rest of the group .

At 2:30am we begann the ascend. 6 hours of crawling uphill followed. 6 hours in which everybody was constantly contemplating their own physical and mental condition and probability to reach the peak. I must say that I never walked that slow before. At an altitude of more than 5000m every step costs a lot of energy. If you do one step to fast, your lungs and your heart will immediately remind you that their power is limited. The closer we got to the top the more breaks we took. While we more or less walked the first two hours without any breaks, towards the end sometimes breaks were neccessary every 15 steps.

The weather was perfect for the ascend, almost no wind and moderate temperatures. They say Chachani is a good mountain with a good spirit and good energy. Well, he (actually in Quechua this mountain is female) more or less took all my energy but the feeling that you get standing on the top compensates for everything.

At this point I really have to thank my tour guide Yudy so much. Without her I certainly would not have made it to the top. She taught me many important things like how to breathe, when to eat, when to drink, how to walk. I doped myself with coca leaves and Nasenspray to fight my cold and any possible altitude sickness and apart from some stomach aches (because of wrong breathing) I only had to fight against my inner Schweinehund to accomplish my mission.

I am very happy I did it and actually can only recommend doing it to everyone, because words cannot describe what it feels like. And in the end it definetly is something that changes you and your perception of things - and 100% positive