Not enough oxygen ot hte brayn mak mee nott theenk welll lll or gud... ndan umm snnw

The pics above are from a trip that I took with Bonnie (my fellow science teacher) and her daughter and my neighbor Aloni (who teaches Math at Bolivar). We took an evening bus on Friday to the city of Manizales with the main goal of depriving our brains of oxygen by going too high up in the atmosphere. The city of Manizales looks like it was built by a bunch of Aunt Bev's. It's basically a normal city placed on top of a bunch of very steep hills and tiny mountains. You have to get used to driving up and down on rediculous grades a LOT. For those who don't know my Aunt Bev this was meant to be complimentary because she LOVES climbing hills and mountains.

The main goal of the trip was to climb up the Nevado del Ruiz which is Spanish for "really enormously big mountain". Above you can see a far off shot of the Ruiz. We stayed in Manizales with some friends of mine from Queen's Con-Ed. I still can't believe how many Queen's Con-Eddies are down here in Colombia. We could have our own homecoming reunions.

We got a driver and guide to take us up the Ruiz, getting out occasionally to get used to the elevation and check things out. The Nevados are a national park and going up is just amazing. As we ascended the plant life and climate went through huge changes. In the top picture above you can see these funny looking plants that are named "Donkey ears" for the feel of the leaves. I think they only live at high elevation and they grow about 1cm a year. Yep, that means the 1m tall ones are a whopping 35 years old (did I get anyone with that).

After that it chaged to just some mosses and course grasses, and finally, nothing. No plants at all. Just rocks and gravel. At this point we were up to about 4500m.

Eventually we got out and started up on foot. It is quite common to throw up at this point from altitude sickness and I was starting to feel nauseous. Several other people who were doing the climb were pausing the throw up. Nice.

Near 5000 meters it was everything I could do to put one foot in front of the other. I had to constantly concentrate on my breathing and if I took even a few steps too quickly I got very dizzy and had to sit down. Quite an experience. I don't know if I've ever felt so helpless. I made it up to the 5000 meter flag but couldn't go on anymore. Bonnie and Aloni and our guide pushed on to the glacier above.

We all had ripping headaches on the way down. We decided to stop at a little hot springs place and that certainly made me feel better. Nothing like packed peanut butter and banana sandwiches and hot spring to make one feel better.

To be honest, I felt like I was extremely hung over. Maybe next time I'll just go drinking instead of going up a mountain.

All in all, an incredible experience. Not one that I need to do again right away though. I think that I'll stick to mountains where I can exert my muscles more than my red blood cells for the next little while.