Jade Mountain, Taiwan

I'm back from my two week Easter holiday to Taiwan and back to work. The return trip felt like it would never end- we caught the plane from Taipei to Beijing at 1 pm on Saturday (Taiwan time), spent 7.5 hours wandering Beijing airport, (which by the way feels like a ghost airport. It's huge but only has about one departing flight an hour), caught the plane at midnight, arrived in Madrid at 6.30 am Sunday (Spain time), rushed to the bus station and caught a bus to Logrono at 8 am.

The only good thing about being back was that the sun was shining so we bought 2 litres of beer and sat on the sofa in our patio.

One of the best parts of the trip was climbing Jade Mountain, the highest mountain in Taiwan, with my parents and Alvaro. We went with a group from my dad's university. The first day we climbed about 1000 metres in height, to 3400 metres. It wasn't so bad at first, but Alvaro and I were carrying backpacks of around 12 kg and the higher up you get, the more you notice the lack of oxygen and every kilo gets exponentially heavier. (Photo: the main peak of Jade Mountain, hidden in the clouds)

The next morning, we woke up at 1.30 am to have breakfast and climb to the 4000 metre peak in time to see the sunrise. Unfortunately, it was cloudy so we didn't see the sun, but it was still amazing. At some parts, the track was one person wide, with a dizzying drop that you couldn't see the bottom of because of the clouds and fog. At the beginning of March, a guy slipped and fell. He died.

Towards the summit, my gloves were soaking wet, it was freezing, my head torch was running low and there were no longer any trees, just rocks and scree. It was a practically vertical climb, hauling myself up from rock to rock.

I can't say the view was amazing because there was no view, no vegetation, just clouds, but the feeling of being so removed from the rest of the world is really indescribable.

One of my dad's students almost got hypothermia on the summit. She was crouched on the ground, freezing and said she didn't want to go down, just wanted to sleep. Another student didn't climb up because he had altitude sickness- his heart was pounding about 120 beats a minute and he said he felt nauseous.

On the climb down, I nearly slipped a few times and I had nightmares of Alvaro falling down the abyss and me having to tell his mother in Spain that I'd killed her youngest child.

When we got the the place where we spent the night, we had 'lunch', at 9 am, then headed back down the mountain. I can honestly say it was the earliest I'd ever eaten lunch.