Ain't no mountain high enough

Alright, so I'm getting a little behind on these...About Pucon, I think I've finally rested up enough in order to write about it now. Don't get me wrong, the place was beautiful, it was just a lot more exercise than I had planned on. So we took our 12 hour bus ride to Pucon, and I didn't sleep the entire night, so that helped my energy level sooo much when we got there. We ended up finding this fairly decent hostel called Donde German, and we moved all of our stuff into it and rested a little bit. The next morning, we decided to climb the volcano at 7:30...can I just add right now that I wasn't all that enthusiastic to be climbing the thing in the first place? So anyways, we put on all of our gear, which included a backpack with about eight pounds of stuff in it, boots that weighed seriously about ten pounds each, and these blue wind suits that we had a lot of fun taking pictures with :) So we drive to the volcano, and we all get out and take a few pictures and play around with our little ice picks that we got, etc. Heather and I had been planning on taking the chairlift up the volcano for the first hour, but it turns out that the lift was broken, of course!, so we had to climb the whole thing. Now, you all know that I'm not exactly an exercise person, so about thirty seconds into the climb, I'm already exhausted and can't breathe. Meanwhile, our guide was like an expert rock climber, and he's dragging our group along at Superman speed, and I slowly started to lag behind. About a half hour into it, Heather is lagging with me, and we're taking breaks every minute or two. This volcano was seriously so steep, we had to use ice picks to get up, and the picks were really short, so it was hard to stay balanced while leaning down so far. So after a while, it's just me and Heather, since our superman group is way ahead of us at this point, and we come to the rocky area, where we were basically rock climbing without ropes. I was so exhausted I could hardly move, and Heather was having a really hard time, too. We were almost silent the entire way, and our faces must have both looked so pissed off, because we were seriously stuggling. At one point when we were climbing the rocks, Heather just stopped dead in her tracks and said, "Fuck this!" And she had been the one that was the most enthusiastic about climbing the thing! So we finally caught up with our group, mainly because they had to wait for us, and after about 5 and a half hours we had finally reached the snowy part of the volcano. At this point, our guide turned to Heather (I don't know why he didn't turn to me as well, because she and I were both struggling) and told her that she should probably turn around right now and go back down with a different guide, since we had FOUR MORE HOURS left to climb before we reached the top. This was really frustrating because we could literally see the top of the volcano, and it was sooo close! But due to the snow and ice, it was a slower, harder climb. So, obviously, I gladly volunteered to go back down with her (do you seriously think I was crazy enough to keep going?) and we went back down. It was the worst feeling in the world---I was soooo tired I just wanted to die. The next day we were all so sore we could barely move. Luckily that night, though, we got to go to the natural hot springs, which was like a lake that felt like a hot tub because it's heated by volcanic activity. It was glorious! And that's pretty much all we did in Pucon, since we were too exhausted to do anything else. I'm glad I went and got to see the gorgeous view from the volcano, I just wish I wouldn't have had to torture myself with the climb in order to see it!