Yesterday was supposed to be our attempt at finding our way to El Perote so that we could experience the towering Cofre de Perote, all 4,274 meters (14,104 feet) of it. Well yesterday didn’t bring us there but today did. We found ourselves about 100 feet short of the rocky summit and very short of breath just after mid-day looking down on the sea of clouds several thousand feet below us. Wow.
We didn’t spend much time at the dormant volcano’s “almost” summit due to the fact we both were feeling quite light headed there at the highest elevation either of us has ever been to. Upon gearing back up and fumbling with the bikes to get them facing downhill we found that the bikes weren’t all that interested in starting back up. Hmmm, right, I think the bikes are bit light headed too. Well, seeing as there’s no need for the engine to propel us downhill and the brakes aren’t reliant on the bike having power, we realized we didn’t need the bikes running anyway as we worked our way back down the 24 kilometer cobblestone and dirt road that had brought us up the last 1,900 meters; Yeah, 6,270 vertical feet in under 15 miles. My head hurts just from the memory of it.
After descending several thousand feet we turned off the road onto a dirt track that wove though a cleared area looking for a good place to pitch the tent and have us some food. We found an idealic spot, in what turned out to be a pasture, with a view of the summit and the sea of clouds below us. After having some food, setting up the tent and a bit of high altitude frisbee we were about spent and thinking about getting into our sleeping bags and waiting for sleep to wash over us.
The sun was beginning to duck behind the trees when we noticed a couple of boys heading toward us from the pasture above. One was on foot, the other on a horse and together they were herding their flock of sheep right through our carefully chosen spot. We greeted the shepherds as they approached. Their response was not nearly as cheery as our greeting with one of them saying something to the tune of “hay un problemo” and something else about “la policia.” After trying to play the “no comprendo” card a bunch of times they told us we could stay the night if we paid them 550 pesos, considerably more than we had spent on the hotel in La Papantla. We motioned that we would leave, only to have them counter offer with 120 pesos. We really had no interest in paying anything for the night’s stay (and it didn’t seem that paying them something would get them to leave us alone anyway) because we thought we were staying in the National Park. So under the close watch of the shepherds we packed up our things and headed back up the dirt track to the road.
We figured if we rode up the mountain a bit higher and got away from the cleared pastures we would be alright for the night. But neither of us was really sitting easy about our interaction with the shepherds and then there was the little town not far from the spot they flushed us out of. We did our standard “get off the main road, then get of the side road” procedure and tucked our bikes and the tent under a couple of dwarf pine trees. Laying the bikes on their sides and covering them with grass made our camp all but invisible from 20 feet away in the fading light. You might say we were a bit paranoid. We felt like banditos.
If you’ve ever tried sleeping at 10,000 plus feet then you know what we were in for. Hours of tossing and turning between glances out of the tent at the incredibly bright display of stars somehow endured the both of us through the night. Sleep, if I really did get there, was measured in minutes.
-Colin
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