I imagine the chaos inside that part of my brain directing muscle repair— Muscle Command:
“More quads? The skin won’t hold more quads, Sir!”
“Calves?”
“She can’t give anymore calves, Cap’n!”
“Right, Ensign. He’s demanding too much. Turn up the soreness and crank stiffness to max! Cramp if you need to!”
“Ok, Ok, he wants more of that random muscle on the back of his neck, I won’t judge. Here you go, you circus freak, six-pack nape coming right up.”
We end up with a full rest day at Rumiloma, thanks to a schedule change. The original plan was to stay at Tambo the day after the Coto summit. Tambo is only 40 minutes from the Coto parking lot, and we had left all our extra gear there before the climb. So once we limped down from the hut, crammed into the bus, and rolled into Tambo, we thought the day was basically over. A shower, a nap, maybe a horizontal life reboot.
But Ossy has other ideas. He pulls the six of us—the four climbers plus Ossy and Pablo—into a small round table in the same restaurant where we’d eaten the day before. He lays out an alternative: If we prefer, we can skip Tambo entirely, ride back to Quito with the outgoing climbers, and spend two nights at Rumiloma before the four-hour drive to Chimbo on Sunday.
My vote is immediate: stay at Tambo. I am exhausted, grimy, half-feral, and I can’t fathom getting back in that van for another two-plus hours. Paul agrees. Mengezi votes for Quito. Jeff says nothing. Ossy gives us five minutes to discuss.
Jeff finally admits he likes the idea of private rooms for two nights rather than another round of shared bunk dens. I hadn’t realized that shared bunk rooms were our destiny at Tambo—I’d seen the “VIP Cabañas” on the drive in and naïvely assumed we might be staying there. They are, apparently, not for us. Mengezi says he wants a night out in downtown Quito.
I reconsider. The gravitational pull of hot showers and soft beds is powerful. That makes three votes for Quito. Paul, being both endlessly reasonable and terminally nice, relents. And so we pile back into that damned van.
We stop for a massive pizza lunch at El Hornero, inhale half our body weight in carbs, and make it back to Rumiloma around 4 p.m., wrecked but salvageable.
Travels With Burma Jones 