Walking in the mountains

Hallo again people, another message from me. Irene and I have been exploring Mérida a bit more lately - we visited an ice cream place which is in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the most flavours in the world, more than 900! Although they don´t have all of them at the same time. So naturally we had to try some! As our ´safe´ flavours, Irene had tutti frutti and I had kiwi fruit, and as our other flavours, I had one scoop of beer and one of coca-cola. And they were really good! The beer really tasted like beer, and didn´t taste bad at all. Irene had ´Power Ranger´ which was horrible, we´re not sure exactly what it was but it tasted like it had very old pieces of cornflake in it :( And she also had cheese, which sounds disgusting but was actually quite nice :)

Mérida has the longest and highest cable car in the world, so of course we had to have a go on it, and went up yesterday. I´m not all that keen on cable cars, but I have to say the view was incredible. There were 4 stations, and we stopped and got out at each one. The highest station at Pico Espejo was at around 4600 metres, and was very cold (luckily we took warm clothes) - you could feel that there was a lot less oxygen in the air, taking a few steps took a lot more effort than normal. The view was amazing, we could look out at clouds on our level over the mountains.

Then we went back down to the third station, and set off on a walk through the mountains to the tiny village of Los Nevados, about 9 km away. According to the traveller´s bible (Lonely Planet) it could be walked in about 5 hours, and we were sure we could tackle it. There was a man with mules at the beginning where you could ride a mule to the village, but we were sure we wouldn´t need them (poor animals). Well, the first part of the walk was terrible - all uphill, and because the air was thinner than normal we had to stop every minute because we could hardly breathe! After an hour we met some people on mules coming the other way and asked if it was all uphill, and they said no, it was mostly downhill after that, but the mule man said he´d return the tourists to the beginning and come back to fetch us.

We carried on and finally reached the top of the hill, and then thank goodness it really was downhill afterwards, although after a while it also got quite difficult because it was very steep and the path was full of stones and rocks. Very pretty scenery, but our feet really hurt! After walking for 3 and a half hours we reached the end of the downhill part and where the uphill began again. We still hadn´t met the mule man and didn´t believe he would come for us. Our muscles hurt and we didn´t dare stop and wait for him in case he didn´t come and we were stuck in the mountains in the dark all night. We realised he wasn´t going to come and were going to stand up and start the next part on foot when, like a miracle, the mules came around the corner! We were so happy! Even though I felt sorry for the poor mules and ponies, I felt more sorry for myself so we took the mules (the guy charged us almost the same amount as if we had taken the mules from the beginning, the bastard) It took us an hour and a half more to get to the village, the rest of the walk wasn´t too bad and I think we could have managed it, but we would have arrived feeling very miserable so it´s a good thing the mule man found us!

Los Nevados is a very sweet village, lots of tourists visit it to spend the night (there´s nothing else to do there) and we got a room plus dinner and breakfast included. It was so cold there, at least for us, we stayed in a dormitory with 4 other beds, no one else was there so we piled on all the blankets from the other beds. I think coming back to Holland will be a shock for us! This morning we took a jeep back to Merida with 2 other Dutch tourists and 2 Germans. The trip took nearly 5 hours, and we drove right on the cliff edge through the mountains, a bit scary!

Tomorrow I´m being a daredevil (at least for me it will be), I hope my fear of heights won´t get in the way too much! More news when I´ve survived it!