Free Up the Down Volcano (Kindle Single) by Sloane Crosley Page A

is looking especially hard today. I will walk past a restaurant and have the thought: I should order out from there later .
    Rather than research Quito on my own, I decide to leave my whole trip to chance. And to Facebook. Unlike casting a social networking net about Paris or Buenos Aires, where comment box after comment box would compete in an e-thumb war for supreme regional wisdom, people are content to deliver their advice regarding Quito in isolation. So few have spent time there. Three people chime in, writing me directly. One suggests a restaurant and a fruit drink, one suggests a museum with paintings of animated skeletons, and the third suggests I climb one of the highest active volcanoes in the world. Dubious of the Internet connection I’ll have in my small Quito hotel (racist), I print out the list and hold it in my hand as I lock my door and struggle to get my jacket over my shoulder. Each activity on this list seems equally viable. Looking back, I think it’s because they were all presented in the same point-size type.

    •••

    Now feels like as good a time as any to mention that I’ve never been skiing. You have to be under four feet tall to see the appeal of skiing. Everyone knows there are magic bravery crystals on the surface of the snow that whisper, telling you it’s fun to go speeding down nature’s backbone as if it won’t kill you. After a certain age you become too tall to hear the crystals. Underexposure to them alters your hearing for the rest of your life. When you’re an adult the question “want to go skiing next weekend?” actually sounds like “want to go bungee jumping with this old dental floss I just found?” The big selling points for adult ski trips, or the ones most regularly paraded out for my unskilled benefit, are hot tubs and mugs of warm liquid. Even for someone as lazy as myself, I am turned off by this gluttony of comfort. Let me get this straight: While all my friends exercise and bond, my reward for a hard day of crafting naughty snowmen is extra marshmallows in my cocoa. As it is with most things in life, this sounds at once like both Heaven and Hell. Maybe later, when I grow bored of lying on rugs, I can wander into town, spin a couple of postcard racks and try on a sweater made of bobcat pelt. No winter sporting expeditions for me, thanks.
    This is more or less what I tell Edgardo, my spider monkey of a mountain guide, when he appears at my hotel on my second day in Quito. I knew Edgardo was coming. He is a friend of the hotel’s Peruvian receptionist, a shock-pretty university student whose affections I like to think I have won. This I have achieved by hanging back, waiting patiently while other tourists ask stupid questions and then asking brilliant ones of my own. Like how to use the toilet in my room.
    When not manning the front desk and booking expeditions to the Galápagos Islands, the receptionist likes to climb mountains. Living in Quito comes in handy. The capital is located in the goose pot of one of the most densely collected circle of peaks on the continent, including Cayambe , Cotopaxi, the very-fun-to-say Pichincha and the soft-looking Imbabura with its mystical importance. The Incans used to worship it. Imbabura is Zen in rock form. It’s also not the one I intend to climb.
    When I tell the receptionist the day before of my interest in climbing Cotopaxi, a mountain I apparently can’t be bothered to Google, she seems unfazed. She went last month. The volcano has a perfectly symmetrical crater. The summit is the most stunning one she’s ever seen. Why wouldn’t I go? Looking at a photograph of her and her boyfriend tacked to the wall behind her — both of them wearing head-to-toe North Face and holding up ice picks from which all the power of the universe emanates — I decide to play up my ignorance. It’s hard not to think of Darwin when visiting this part of the planet, and if my survival depends on me acting like an idiot, so be it. This