As far as backpacking goes, scouring the earth for god incarnate in the form of mountains probably isn't the most typical approach.
31 days
My fascination with mountains began when I took a long holiday from my job as a software developer at Amazon in London. I'd saved my holidays for the entire year without taking a single day off, and thanks to some days carried over from the year before and a weird bug in the vacation tracking portal, I had a straight 31 days of allowance. My line manager was super cool and let me take it all in one go. I decided on Peru, on my elder sister's recommendation.
I planned the trip as a tour de force of Peru: an Ayahuasca retreat in the Amazon (you can read more about my take on psychedelics here), then down to Cusco for the Inca Trail, then up to central Peru for some treks in the Andes. It was a great introduction to backpacking and hostels, and I flourished in the rapid-fire, transient relationships that solo travellers depend on.
As for trekking, the Inca Trail was alright. The final sight of Machu Picchu is incredible, of course, but the trek itself is nothing special. What really captured my imagination was in a trekking town called Huaraz, nestled in the Andes, the final stop of the trip.
Huayhuash
Proper mountains: until then I'd only seen the boring non-snowy ones.
Before leaving London I'd come across a trek called the Huayhuash (pronounced "why wash?", lol). From everything I read it looked like quite an endeavour, far harder than the Inca Trail, reaching an altitude of 5,000m. Intimidated, I put together a brief but rigorous gym routine of pack training on the stepping machine (aka the booty builder).
The Huayhuash was where I first encountered snow-capped mountains. Proper mountains: until then I'd only seen the boring non-snowy ones. There were several notable viewpoints. The first was the campsite on the second night, overlooking a lake with Siula Grande on the other side. (For those in the know, Siula Grande is the mountain climbed in my favourite documentary, "Touching the Void". If you haven't seen it, go watch it as soon as you can.) The second was the view of three lakes set beside a ridge of mountains midway through the trek, the typical postcard/Instagram shot. The highlight, though, was the top of the San Antonio pass, which reveals the inner circle of the whole mountain range the trek circumambulates.
It's hard to describe the effect mountains have on me. Something about their grand scale, and the hostile conditions at their peaks, provokes a sense of awe and divinity I've struggled to find anywhere else in the natural world, at least with the same quality. Needless to say, I was hooked, and I developed a love-hate relationship with hiking for the sole aim of encountering these giants.
Quitting
After Peru, I took a year out from travelling and carried on at Amazon. Office work had started to grind on me more than before, probably because of the "revelations" I'd had in my Ayahuasca ceremony and the unbounded sense of freedom you taste when you go backpacking. I asked my boss if I could take a sabbatical to feed my travelling curiosity. It turned out too many employees at Amazon Europe were taking sabbaticals at the time, and my only choice if I wanted to keep travelling was to quit.
So quit I did. Almost exactly a year after ending the Peru trip, I headed back to South America.
I planned it much like Peru: start with an Ayahuasca retreat to "open my mind", then backpack, only this time with more flexibility since it was open-ended. My only real plan was to visit Torres del Paine in Chile to do the "W Trek".
Fitz Roy
I was accosted by overwhelming synchronicities the entire trek.
On the way down to Chile, I stopped in Argentinian Patagonia for some independent trekking and mountain chasing. Landing in El Calafate, my first feeling was profound self-doubt: "WTF am I doing?" I'd just flown all the way from Ecuador to southern Argentina, skipping loads of incredible places along the way (Colombia, Brazil, etc). I was annoyed at myself for being so careless with my time and money, trying to "skip ahead" to landmark experiences instead of seeing what might have happened on the way. I felt I'd made a bad call, until someone in my hostel told me about a nearby trekking town called El Chaltén, a town that would change my life forever.
El Chaltén has a rather famous mountain called Fitz Roy. It's so striking, so visually bizarre next to its neighbours, that it's the mountain on the Patagonia logo. It was unlike anything I'd ever seen. On the day of the Fitz Roy trek the weather was fantastic. I trekked right up to the viewpoint at Laguna de los Tres and sat there in amazement for a good three hours. The time flew by. It was indescribably beautiful, and it felt profoundly spiritually resonant to me. I was accosted by overwhelming synchronicities the entire trek. I was out for a good 15 hours, leaving early morning and returning late at night, and even turned back at one point to see the mountain by night.
It's hard to put into words how much the experience meant to me. Maybe I'll go into what all those synchronicities meant in another post, but that's a deep rabbit hole that deserves its own.
Torres del Paine
Ironically, when I got to Torres del Paine, the weather throughout the entire trek sucked. It was outright miserable. There was a profound irony in the planned centrepiece of the whole trip feeling so disappointing for most of it, and so expensive to boot, while the cheaper, hostel-based trek to Fitz Roy had been so glorious. It sent me a message that the best things often come unplanned.
Thankfully, not all was lost. I'd made friends in separate groups along the way and enjoyed their company throughout. Even though the sky was grey and rainy for most of the trek (so much so that I barely saw the famous granite mountains until the last day), I took solace in my new friends and the beautiful blue waters beneath.
We walked together through much of the early trek, only to part ways when I realised I'd made a major fuck-up: I'd booked the wrong final refuge, the one right by the exit. The famous granite spires were much closer to the refuge all my friends had booked. Mine was a good 4-5 hour trek from theirs, and theirs was another four hours from the spires.
The 2am push
Go home, or properly send it.
I was left with a conundrum: go home, or properly send it. It was late on the final evening and I'd quietly decided to leave. Then something came over me in the middle of the night, and I realised that if I left at 2am and went fast, I could probably make it up for sunrise. So I did. I trekked all the way from the exit to the granite spires in one massive push. And lo and behold, all the friends I'd made, from separate groups, were sitting TOGETHER at the base of the spires, under a beautiful blue sky, with a glorious amber sun peeking over the horizon.
It was totally worth it. Despite the expense, despite all the type 3 fun leading up to it, I got to see those incredible towers, each standing over a kilometre tall from its base. Imagine that: three sheer, flat, vertical rock faces jutting out of the ground, over 1,000m each. It was mesmerising, all set against the lake just beneath.
We walked back down to the exit together and parted ways. I wouldn't see anything like it until I returned to Asia a year later, where I'd go on to visit Nepal and holy Mount Kailash in Tibet, the centre of the world.