Avenue of the volcanoes

Let the story unravel finally....

I left Ecaudor today and traveled North parallel with the snow capped peaks skimmming the ether off the clouds. They call the route between Riobamba and Quito "the avenue of the volcanoes", and it is aptly named. Above the cloud sea looking out at around an altitude of 25,000 ft. I'm level with the giants here. Today they are slumbering and dormant wrapped in shrouds of ice and mist.

To the East I first saw Sangay. A distant white cone rising out of the clouds with the hazy blue-green of the Amazon basin receding behind it in the distance like some tropical mount doom from another world. Later looking West the massive caldera of Chimborazo looms like a monster poised over the Earth. And perambulating from this high moving perch I can even see the sooty brown cone of Tunhgaraga and the ice covered spires of the Alters rising above the wispy clouds like the splintered ruins of some vast shipwreck out at sea.

Before plunging back through the cloud blanket I passed at eye level with Cotopaxi and snapped this picture. Draped in perpetual ice though nearly perfectly straddling the equator line Cotopaxi seems to defy even the forces of nature itself juxtaposed between such extremes.

Finally descended to Earth later that day it was as if I had emerged from some beautiful dream and when I woke up I had arrived in a new land.

Bienvenidos a Colombia.