At last… I am back on two wheels. Today we went mountain biking down the side of Cotopaxi which is classed as an active volcano.

It was an early start with a 2 hour jeep ride to the refuge at 4600m. There was only myself and Katie doing the ride on this day so our guide was having to follow us down with the jeep rather than leading us down on his bike so it was up to us to follow the correct path and not ride off the side.

Luckily for everyone involved it was too cold at 4600m for me to be able to don any Lycra so sadly the pictures of us do not contain any cycling shorts. I know that will disappoint some of you who are reading this!

The first part of the ride was entirely downhill on gravel single track roads until the path flattened out around 3000m. Katie was tentative at the start but soon found that she was quite good and came tearing past me on one of the straights. After half an hour or so she asked me how to "make the bike jump" and really got into the swing of it in time for the flat and uphill pedalling.

We were now on the flat plains that once were a deep canyon. This canyon was filled with ash and molten rock during the last explosion of the volcano levelling the top to a nice smooth finish with the occasional rock to negotiate.

All the time we were pedalling the jeep was following along a couple of minutes behind us until we turned round to see the jeep teetering on two wheels about to fall over. The guide had slipped the jeep of the edge of a rather large pothole and now it was stuck on the rear suspension and at a rather precarious angle. We needed help. After some searching at a nearby rangers hut we convinced a guy to come and help tow us out of the sticky situation. We stood back and watched as the jeep slowly emerged for the mire with us remaining nice and clean. We got back on our bike to pedal to our lunch stop when Katie (having remained spotlessly clean throughout the entire ride) fell sideways into the biggest mud bog that she could find. If you look carefully at the photos you can see a rather unhappy looking wife caked in mud from head to toe on one side of her body.

Katie soon cheered up with the help of a huge chocolate brownie for lunch.

The final few kilometres of the ride were through the rain but at least that gave us the chance to rinse the mud off before getting on our bus to Baños.