Shit, that was probably the hardest thing i have ever done climbing Cotopaxi. Started off well with a good group. Me, a yank, two Canadian 18 year old girls and a Swedish dude. All good craic. Got to the volcano and hiked up to the refuge. Had some scran then hot the glacier for some training. I had done it all before in Bolivia so just went to get some pics. Nothing too hard there. But after we gto back to the reuge started to get a headache and felt sick. Only managed some soup for dinner and early to bed (anout 5:30). Got woken up at 23:00 to get ready to tackle the volcano. Started off well but the guide was going at some pace but felt gopod for the first 500m, but then started feeling quite dodge. Legs were running out of steam and was beginning to feel sore all over. Had to keep stopping every 10 mins or so and started discussing with the two groups (me, Sweed, and guide and yank and guide) about possibility of me going down. But after a bit of discussion decided to push for the summit. Last 200m was the worst. Legs on fire, falling over quite a lot asd legs were V wobbly. Think this was mainly due to fact that I hah had feck all to eat for last 12 hours due to nausea brought on from the altitude sickness. Oh and forgot to mention that had to walk the whole way up in a blizzard!!

The volcano is basically almost a perfect triangle so once you start it is an unrelenting grind to the top. There is on flatish bit but this is just a prelude for the even steeper bit towards the summit. Had to sit and chill for 45 mins near the top as got up way too fast. Only too about 5 hours to get up there and sunrise was not till 6ish so had a wee kip at the top. Not a good idea as felt like shit when I woke up. Got to summit for dawn and saw a wee bit of it through the breaks in the clouds. The other stayed at the top for a while for pics but i was getting quite concerned about my currect state and didnñt want to get any worse at the top of a volcano 5900m up as I still had to walk down. So commondeard (sp) Paulo (my guide) and horsed it down the slope. 5 hours up and 1 hour down. Crawled back into the reguge (apt name) and crashed out for a bit. Out of the 25+ people that tried to summit only 5 of us made it. Cotopaxi is a hard, hard volcanoi to climb and people who manage it have my full respect!

But managed to get up at 4am for my flight to Colombia and thankfully am not too crippled today. Will post from Colombia to reassure you all that i´m safe and sound!

Chris