Climb every Mountain...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Chris is a sleek, gazelle-like creature with excellent teeth, who eats a balanced diet and engages in wholesome pursuits. It is likewise maintained that I am a beer- swilling, chain smoking couch potato. The question, then, was this: who would win a race up a volcano between the athletic hare and the alcoholic tortoise?

The volcano in question, Cotopaxi, is Ecuador's second highest point, topping out at somewhere around the 5,800m mark. Our ascent would take us to the highest point reachable without specialist mountaineering equipment, the refuge at 4810m. We parked up at around 4000m to start the challenge. Only fools climb entire volcanoes. The effects can be perfectly replicated by climbing, at the hottest point of the day, a shorter, steeper section of volcano which has been covered to a depth of a foot with a sort of moondust/quicksand and then blizzarded upon.

I had a theory, formulated from that Red Nose Day clip of Chris Moyles up Kilimanjaro, and my own loose grasp of human biology, that smokers actually have an advanatage in the low oxygen environments at high altitude. Something vague about being used to having no oxygen because of all the benzene from the cigarettes. That and the proliferation of new red, oxygen bearing blood cells that I was manufacturing at altitude. (Still obsessed with blood after the Twilight saga, alas, alas). In any case I was feeling sprightly and buoyant and Chris was looking a little peaky so I fancied my chances of at least keeping pace for a change.

After a few minutes of uphill struggle it became apparent that Action Mounsher really was having a hard time with the thinning air. Being the nice, caring kind of girlfriend that I am I decided to wait for him to catch up so that I could conduct some thinly veiled gloating designed as scientific enquiry.

"Does it really, really hurt"? This with a furrowed forehead denoting deep concern.
Yes, it really does actually.
"Does it feel like you have swum too far underwater in the swimming pool?"
Sort of.
"Does it feel like you are being too tightly hugged by a large animal say a bear or perhaps an anaconda?"
A little.
"Does it feel like your chest cavity is being squeezed past all endurance by a large vice and that your lungs are but moments from bursting forth through your chest and splattering on the mountainside?"
Similar, apparently. And does it really help to be interrogated in this exasperatingly cheerful manner while you are gasping like a landed fish and tottering up a 70 degree slope? It would seem not. Tiring of the torture and experimenting with my newly found hi-tech lungs I bounded up into the snowline and ate a muffin smugly. It may seem an obvious point when you're 5km up in the air and sitting in a snow drift but it is rather cold up that volcano. So after politely inspecting the inside of the refuge (serious mountaineers with ropes on, lots of light coloured wood in the manner of a sauna) we decided to head back down again. There was apparently a glacier under the snow somewhere, but we reasoned that looking for ice under ice was not what we had left England in January for. And besides, one of our party was wearing trainers, no one had any gloves and the two supposedly fittest members were about to drop dead from asphyxia. So down again we bounded and eventually, after some quite wicked dust surfing we fetched up back in the oxygenated zone and everyone cheered up a little.
' I feel AMAAAAAZING!' I trilled, to subtly stress the point that I was brave and intrepid and everyone else was a girly weed. Fortunately my companions were too well- mannered to push me into the ravine.

And so to Laguna Quilotoa. This is a huge sulphurous lake in the crater of a long-dormant volcano. The original plan had been to hike around the perimeter (about 8 hours) but as we crawled along in Carnaval holiday traffic we revised this. Plan B was to descend into the crater, dabble our toes in the water, eat a picnic and then climb back up to the crater lip. We were at lower altitude but still high enough, I reasoned, for me to complete the double over my hapless boy and make the ascent in record time.

Foiled! At low altitudes Chris suffered none of the ill effects of the previous climb and was looking ominously swift. Worse, I had compounded my arrogance by stuffing myself with cold salami and olives and consequently could barely haul myself into a standing position. Yet I still believe I could have given him a run for his money were it not for the mules. Bastard, bastard mules. The local indigenas hire out horses to take you back up the crater for the princely sum of $8. We had confidently scoffed at the idea on the way down but after a few hundred steps another pair of the buggers came trotting past. More uphill agony was punctuated every ten minutes by the arrival of another pair of delicious tempting mules - with the price remaining resolutely fixed at $8- and as the afternoon wore on I began to hallucinate mules with ice creams, mules with beer dispensers, mules with helicopter rotor blades and in-flight meals. Chris was pulverising me with pace and, to my everlasting shame, providing support and company as I staggered along cursing him, the crater, lunch, the mules, other climbers and my own foolishness. We climbed forever, for weeks it seemed, and not even once I had collapsed at the top (searching feverishly for a cigarette) did he mention my previous smugness. May angels bring him gifts and sweet things. The deciding fixture will take place on Macchu Picchu in July.

I wonder if you can ride llamas?