Volcano Villarrica from Pucon

Volcan Villarrica

I climbed the volcano Villarrica the day after the Half-Ironman and at the top in the crater I saw lava for the first time - it was awesome! I've wanted to see lava for as long as I can remember, and missed seeing it on several other active volcanoes in Indonesia, Hawaii, and Guatemala, but now I finally did. I was so excited. The crater was a safe distance below us but it was bubbling away and would "erupt" every couple minutes throwing lava high into the air. I was so psyched!

Pucon Half-Ironman finishline

Half-Ironman in Pucon, Chile

I celebrated my birthday last weekend by going to Pucon, Chile to compete in the Half-Ironman there. It was hard. Harder than I thought it would be. And I was slow. Not surprising considering I haven't trained in almost 2 months. It is a fairly famous race and there were about 40 pros there, for the supposedly "hardest Half-Ironman in the world".

I made some mistakes and had some excitement that I wish I didn´t have as well. An hour before the race I had 2 flat tires! Too much pressure I guess. But only one spare. It freaked me out because that meant that if I got another flat my race was over, with no spare. And that meant that I didn't have time to warm up.

I finished in 6:29, which was about half an hour slower than I expected. But I was happy enough with the bike considering I haven´t ridden in over a month.

The run was a killer. It was 3 laps through a park and then through town. The park bit was up and down several steep hills, and it killed me, and most people... 3 times.

It was great fun though and all the people from my hostal came out to cheer for me, which was awesome. Actually they helped make it the most fun race I´ve ever done. There were about 10,000 or so fans there, a beautiful setting on a lake with mountains and volcanoes surrounding, and the weather was perfect, about 70 degrees. But next time I need to train!

Iguazu Falls... is not small

The trickle they call Iguazu Falls

It's big in fact, very big. It spans the border of Brazil and Argentina and when you first approach it from the Argentine side you only see a few small falls, and I was thinking "is this it?" with a feeling of distain. But then as you go further you can see hundreds of cascades in a several kilometer semicircle. The highlight by far though was the Garganta del Diablo ("Devil's throat"), which is a single fall with an enormous volume of water that produces so much mist it is practically impossible to see to the other side from the top and creates a perpetual rainbow in front of its drop. If the Argentine side has the best walks with many different view points to see different falls, the Brazilian side has the panoramic view. From there you can see the entirety of the falls and gives you a much better perspective of the fall in all their grandeur.

High camp - Aconcagua

Altitude sickness on Aconcagua

Aconcagua is the highest mountain in the world outside of the Himalayas; typical expeditions take 2-3 weeks to summit; I attempted to do it in 4 days. But after hiking for 14 hours the first day until 1am and still not getting to base camp, I had a feeling about what it was going to be like. Unlike every other expedition my climbing partner (who was crazy enough to go with me) and I opted against renting mules to carry our gear to base camp, so we carried about 80 pounds each up the seemingly endless and aptly named "death march" to base camp. What fun is climbing if you need mules to help? There we had a medical check and my O2 sat was only 73. That's lower than most emphysema patients! But would that stop me... of course not. We headed up to high camp and planned to summit 2 days later. But on our summit day we woke up with terrible headaches and severe altitude sickness. Such was our limit; we headed down after only reaching 6,000m. With more time it would have been a cake walk, but what fun is a cake walk when you want to live ultra-ridiculously?