Going blind in Riobamba
After an overnight bus to Riobamba we had a lazy day looking round the town, organising stuff for the next few days and catching up with things like doing the laundry. The following day we went to Banos a small toursity town about an hour away. It was a nice place to go for the day but that was long enough. It is in a valley by a river surrounded by waterfalls and overlooked by an active volcano which last erupted about 2 years ago. We went for a bit of a walk up to some viewpoints but unfortunately it was cloudy so we couldn´t actually see the volcano. The following day we set off on a 2 day trip to climb a 5000m volcano near Riobamba. Unfortunately the weather still hadn´t improved and when we set off it was still overcast and we were yet to see what we were going to climb. The first day was just a walk to acclimatise, as we spent most of the day walking in the clouds, rain and sleet, it wasn´t great and by the time we reached the refugio where we were to spend the night we were all cold and soaked through to our underwear. We got up at 4am the following day and as it was only snowing a bit we decided to try and do the climb. But yet again the weather deteriorated and we spent all day in the clouds and snow. The climb itself wasn´t too difficult, mostly walking, with the top section being a bit steeper, and in the conditions we had it got quite difficult so we were relieved when we finally reached the top. Coming down the top section was as difficult as going up but once we had done that it was relatively easy going back to the refugio. Although the weather did improve slightly for the last hour of the walk, the volcano remained in the clouds so we never actually saw what we had climbed. We had a relaxing evening in Riobamba with a nice dinner and bottle of wine followed by an early night, or so we thought. When I closed my eyes to sleep they started hurting a lot and this just got worse and worse. After about an hour I realised that I couldn´t even open my eyes anymore as they had swollen up so much. So I woke up Cathy who then realised her eyes were hurting, she went to speak to the guy who owned the hostel and he took us to hospital. Although I couldn´t see anything and didn´t have much of an idea what was going on, the hospital seemed well organised and we were soon diagnosed with snow blindness and given a prescription for eyedrops and much needed painkillers. After visiting many pharmacies we were able to go back to bed and actually got a bit of sleep. In the morning I could half open one eye and had a bit of limited blured vision. Luckily Cathy wasn´t quite so bad and could still see relatively well, so we were able to go and get breakfast etc. I then spent most of the day blindfolded and by the evening I was a lot better, I could open both eyes and see enough to get by without too many problems. A couple of days later everything is about back to normal again and we have continued with our travels having learnt an important lesson about wearing sunglassses even when its not sunny.
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