I only become extroverted when I am trying to save money. We saw the fellow tourists in the airport before our flight to Fogo; before we had boarded, we had established that they were a couple of honeymooners from France, and they did in fact want to split a taxi from the airport to the Cha de Caldeiras, the mountain’s base camp, with us. On the flight into the island, we saw the peak dramatically poking out of clouds obscuring the rest of the island- our goal, delivered to our sore eyes by the mountain gods, only to be tantalizingly blocked to us later, though we did not know it yet! We touched down, and grabbed the first taxi, heady with mountain excitement, and made it up to the mountain’s base the same night. We met a guide and set a 6am departure, hoping that the swirling, scudding clouds that kept the summit hidden would be gone by the morning. By 10am we were at the summit, but the experience was much less glorious than expected. Dawn had brought moments of clear weather but the mountain had been offended by our quick climb up a vein of good rock among the volcanic scree, and the clouds had come in thick and cold. We huddled with the honeymooners on the summit, inadequately dressed against the rain and wind. It was funny to imagine that in a whole radius of a thousand miles- covering the entire country as well as the neighboring ones- we were in the one place where it was possible to be this cold. Our friends were less amused, and after twenty minutes of fruitless, stressful waiting, they said they wanted to go down. We generously agreed- who were we to disrupt a honeymoon? The descent was wild and tough and wonderful. We warmed out hands around warm geothermal openings in the rock, and then set off at a dead run down the black scree, through the pouring rain, absolutely wet and covered by the pieces of the mountain. My phone stubbornly refused to take pictures of the scene that was raw and beautiful. All around us was grey- the sky and the mountainside converged at the end of sight, maybe 100 feet around us, and shut us in a world of rock and rain. It was impossible to tell how much longer we would be running down the scree. Our guide’s red jacket led the way, the sole bright spot in the universe. We held hands and bounded down together, absolute wet dogs; the sole of my left boot fell off halfway down, and I gave up the idea that shoes weren’t meant to be jammed with rocks in every crevice. The honeymooners grimly hung on. Finally, we made it to the huge sulfur pit at the bottom of the scree that marked the location of the 2014 eruption that destroyed our guide’s house, and his whole town. We trudged home to our hotel, said goodbye to the honeymooners as they headed back to the airport to keep to their tight schedule, and relaxed as the clouds slowly parted and revealed a beautiful afternoon. We decided not to climb it again the next morning- been there, done that! And ultimately we had experienced it in the best and wildest way we could have asked. Two days later, we found the perfect postscript to the story. The flight our friends were supposed to take out of Fogo had been cancelled. They joined us for our flight back to Praia the next day. MH