One of the recommended activities to do around Quito is mountain biking.. there are many companies offering one- to several-day trips, and I decided to do a two-day tour with one of the highest-recommend outfits: The Flying Dutchman. It was a bit pricey at $110, but that included transport, bikes, food, guide, and one night of accommodation. This is the trip I chose.
At 7am (ugh) I met up with our fearless leader Fernando and my fellow bikers Ali and Chris who are on their gap year from England. We were a small group, which I liked. Fernando and I hit it off, it turns out the contents of his iPod is about 80% the same as mine. Chris and Ali were also delightful fellow travelers.
After a couple of hours driving south from Quito, Fernando turned the Land Rover onto a crazy bumpy flooded dirt track and started heading up Cotopaxi – the world’s highest active volcano, at 19,347 feet.
Now let me just stop here and report on a few science tidbits the local tour operators boast about – you probably thought that Mount Everest was the tallest place on Earth, right? Well, it turns out it depends on how you define tallest. Everest is in fact the highest point on earth when measured from sea level. But if you define the height of a mountain as the distance from it’s base to it’s peak, then Mauna Kea in Hawaii has it beat, even though most of it’s base is underwater. By the same token, Mount McKinley in Alaska also wins. Similarly, some argue that Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania is taller than Everest because it rises straight out of the African plain, whereas Everest is merely one of many peaks topping the enormous base of the Himalayas.
Now, suppose we define “highest mountain” as that which is furthest from the center of the earth. By this definition, Mount Chimborazo (nearby Cotopaxi, here in Ecuador) wins by the technicality that the earth bulges along the equator due to centrifugal force. In fact, Chimborazo is 2.1 kilometers closer to the sun than Everest. A neat fact, although it feels like cheating to me, since by this accounting even the beaches of Ecuador are higher than Everest.
Cotopaxi volcano also boasts one of the few equatorial glaciers in the world. From Wikipedia: “There have been more than 50 eruptions of Cotopaxi since 1738. Numerous valleys formed by powerful lahars (mudflows) surround the volcano. This poses a high risk to the local population, their settlements and fields. During a war between the Incas and the Spaniards in 1534, the volcano erupted and put an end to the fighting as both fled from the battlefield. In the 1877 eruption pyroclastic flows descended all sides of the mountain, with lahars traveling more than 100 km into the Pacific Ocean and western Amazon basin draining the valley.” That’s a long way for lava to flow!
continue reading the rest of this post (and view the photos)…
