Mount Somoto

I can´t believe as of yesterday I have only 1 month remaining in Somoto! Which means in exactly 1 month I will be back in Canada to start the Canadian portion of my journey, where I will be volunteering in Prine Albert, Saskatchewan. But in this remailing month I look forward to the new experianes, and new lessons I am learning every day. Each day I can feel my spanish improving, which was one of my biggest goals that I had set for myself before entering the program.

Well the day will eventually come when I have to leave this wonderful place, and I dont need to dwell on the moment, I just need to focus on the ¨now.¨ But, for now I am going to write about my experiences as I usually do.

This new story starts a day after the epic boxing match of mass proportions:

So I knew it was going to be a busy and exhausting weekend before it started, because I had my Boxing Match, and early the next morning we were heading out to climb the biggest mountain i Somoto, which surprisingly has no name, so I will refer to it as Mount Somoto. We woke up early the next morning at 7pm to pack our lunches and bags for the long journey up the mountain, but little did we know how long of a journey it would be.

So about 10 of us officially started the march at 7:45am, I use the word march because we stil had to walk to the mountain. After about 30 mintues we started the uphill climb towards the mountain. This uphill hike lasted about one hour and thirty minutes.

This picture is one we took during the climb to the base of the mountain. Yes i do know that is sideways, and no i do not know how to fix it, so you´ll just have to tilt your head to see it. The guy to my left is one of the Nicaraguans in our group. But that is not what makes him interesting. He was one of the only Nicaraguans selected to compete at the Beijing olympics. He competed in the 200m sprint. He managed to place 9th, and he was eliminated by Usain Bolt, who was sprinting in the next lane. anyways back to the mountain climb!

once we hit the 2 hour mark we were informed we were still an hour hike from the base of the mountain. This is when we lost about half our group because they were too tired to make the rest of the climb. Now we were left with only 5 people remaining who were left to climb the mountain.

So 3 hours after we left home we managed to get to the very start of the mountain. It was a pretty vigourous hike. It had lots of steep paths that were vey narrow. But the views were spectacular, as you can see by the picture below.


It took us exactly 2:30 hours from the base of the mountain to reach the summit of the mountain. I took this next picture about 100 metres from the top, because from the very top you couldnt see anything because there is so much plant life and trees that seeing anything is impossible.


Those little cluster of houses and buildings you see in the bottom left is our little town of Somoto.

We managed to reach the summit at around 1pm, where we all ate like 6 sandwiches each because we were so hungry from the hike.


This last picture was taken from the very top of the mountain, told you you couldnt see anything. But this is the team of us who managed to make the exhausting but unforgetable trip up the mountain. (photo cred goes to the sherpa guide)


Well you might think this story is finished because we are at the top and everything is all happy, but if you think that then you would be sadly mistaken, becuase we still have the trip down the mountain.

Our guide decided that we would take a different path down the mountain than the way we went up. So we followed without questions. We ended up hiking down a path down for about 20 minutes when it suddenly ended. So we had two options, either go back up and go the same way down, or we were making our own way down the mountian. We opted for the latter. Armed with sticks in hand we had to beat the plants out of the way to clear a path for us down the mountain.

This was probably one of the most fun things we did. I actually felt like an explorer of some sorts. Well we managed to get down the moutain in about two hours. No remember the mountain is still about 3 hours away from Somoto.

So we had been walking and climbing for about 8 hours now, and we still had the walk to Somoto to go. And to make matters better it had just started to rain, well at least it didnt rain while we were climbing.

Well we walked two hours towards Somoto, and by this time we were exhausted, and none of us wanted to go a step further. This is when we called Luis´s father who thankfully picked us up in the pouring rain, and dropped us all to our respective homes.

So the official time for how long the climb took us 10 grueling hours.