By Michelle Bellino
Brought to you by Cornell Outdoor Education: www.coe.cornell.edu

The second you step off the plane, you realize this country is not your own. It is more than the signs with familiar pictures and different words; it is more than the faces that are darker and sharper than yours; it is everything that is different in a way that you cannot stare long enough at it.

The words have no mercy, and there is no room for mistakes. So you act safely, order tortas de huevo y queso and drink Coke. But soon you are asking for popetes and saying gracias to your American friends. The words that filled your mouth like marbles now taste soft. Then there are the bus rides: the rushing to the bano, the borrowing two pesos for toilet paper, buying tickets, sitting next to someone safe. After you get to know this person, you turn you head to the window, remembering to be amazed--watching the country fit itself into small frames of window, accepting every stretch of desert, every blade of grass, every reaching tree as part of this separate, new world.

There is something in the way you treat things in a country that is not your own, even the things that stretch and peel everywhere seem to shine brighter, feel smoother. The dust paints the entire village, so that even the grass on the hills and the donkeys are browned. It is a long walk until we step into a field of green, the tall grass tickling bare ankles.

We walk slowly, carefully in the quiet until we turn a corner into someone else's dream. A million butterflies kissing the puddles, kissing the shaded branches, kissing our fingers. Some lay at our feet, flapping so slowly, dying from a torn wing or a heavy boot. There are so many; if they were lightning bugs, burning a small fire with each breath, their kissing would be the light of the moon.

Finally Orizaba. We unfold our bodies and wipe our dusted faces as we walk into the wind, unprepared for its beauty. Some of us do not sleep the night through. But somehow, even the 3 a.m. nightmare bathroom trips are beautiful. For a moment, you are the only one under the stars; the whole world of Orizaba curving above your tiny body. In the morning the mountain is different, because you have to share it. Its colors are brighter, its edges sharper. The parts of you that were scared have changed into a feeling of want and readiness.

We make it to high camp of Orizaba, happily, and the sun is even shining, reflecting against the glacier. There is a new excitement in the group, hanging in the air between us: the we're-going-to-the-summit-in-two-days kind of excitement. Our cramponed steps on the snow and ice become more confident and they start to crunch in a heartbeat sort of rhythm. We fall asleep under a clear, dark sky and awake to the whole world white; there is no separation between mountain and sky. We all keep to ourselves about what this means, hoping for the sky to return, It does, but very close to the top, the turn-around time is honored and the summit is left behind.

Since we've returned home I have had to explain why we didn't summit. First I explain that the trip was so much more -- that the trip was about learning to speak Spanish, shopping in mercados, eating pollo corazon stir fry, filling the small spaces between two cultures. It was about the new best friends we found in each other. It was about decision making and planting seeds for safe mountaineering.

On the mornings, after we came back, I'd wake with the idea to walk down the street to buy an agua grande and cafe. In conversation I would struggle to keep an entire sentence in English, filtering out the Spanish that floated in. Then I would remember suddenly heavily, wholly, that I was back in Ithaca. It was far from all those things that had become so familiar. But then I unfold a shirt that was kissed by Mexico sun, and I can smell Mexico. Sometimes , a smell is enough to bring you back.