30 days to go...

Ulp.

It's butterflies in the stomach time. Last Friday marked the one-month-to-go point. In a little over 4 weeks, Jeremy and I will board a flight from Heathrow to Buenos Aires. The following morning, we'll land in Argentina, and (one hopes) reclaim our baggage. Then the fun begins...

Step one: Getting to Mendoza. Not, sadly, as easy as following the signs for "Flight Connections". Buenos Aires has two airports - one international and one domestic. So, job one is to find our way across an unfamiliar city armed only with a knowledge of Spanish so limited that it does not even encompass the correct pronunciation of "chorizo" [1]. Job two, armed only with the same Spanish, is to negotiate the excess baggage charges on my luggage, which, as you may recall, are likely to be substantial.

On arrival in Mendoza, we need to find the driver from Fernando Grajales (our guides), and then hare around the town getting our climbing permits. This process involves going to one office to pay the money and get a receipt, which then entitles you to go and get the permit itself somewhere entirely different [2]. Our window of opportunity to achieve this is apparently so narrow that we've been advised to do this straight from the airport rather than check in at our hotel first [3]. I strongly suspect that it will all be a bit fraught.

Still, we should have it all done in time to enjoy the turning of the year over a glass of red wine in the southern hemisphere summer. On New Year's Day day, we'll take a minibus to a resort called Penitentes. The real adventure begins the next day, with a long walk along the Horcones Valley to Confluencia, our first campsite.  We start at 2,950m - by an odd coincidence, exactly the same altitude as the entrance to the Sagarmatha National Park in Nepal - and climb to 3,390m - the height of Phunki Tenga, a village at a river crossing between Namche Bazaar and Tengboche.

Weirdly, many of the campsites on the route up Aconcagua map precisely to points on the trek to Everest Base Camp, which provides the comfort of knowing that I have already walked to most of the altitudes I will be visiting - excepting, obviously, the last couple of milestones.

Does this give me any additional comfort? Do I feel ready? In the last week, for the first time, I'm beginning to think that I might be. I've made two changes that have boosted my confidence.

Firstly, I've taken my trusty Brompton to Edinburgh with me, and I have been commuting between central Edinburgh and my client's offices in the South Gyle. After experimenting with a variety of routes, I've switched from going along the Western Approach Road and past Murrayfield [4], to riding along the Union Canal. This being Scotland, the country that brought us the Forth Bridge and the Falkirk Wheel, the Union Canal is not at the bottom of a valley. It's at the top of two long climbs, and there's a further climb to get from the canal to the top of Castle Hill - which gives me a decent workout on the bike on top of the basic ride.I already feel stronger and fitter from a couple of weeks of regular commuting.

Secondly, carrying excess weight up a mountain is A Bad Thing. Despite my efforts at training, I wasn't shifting the excess pounds that a year of working in India and not exercising had added to my waistline. For the last week or so, I've been Alternate Day Fasting. Which is almost exactly what it sounds like: odd-numbered days, eat normally, even numbered days, eat very little. It sounds extreme, but the evidence is that it has pretty big health benefits and I've been finding it surprisingly easy. On my fast days, I get by on water and endless cups of vending machine tea. It's early days yet, but I have lost a few pounds and I have to tighten my belt a bit more. More importantly, I feel better. Lighter on my feet, more agile. Perhaps surprisingly, more energetic. I carried my elder daughter up a hill in Richmond Park today and barely noticed the extra effort.

Am I ready? I don't know, but my confidence is growing.

[1] How about you? I always think I know, but my confidence, or perhaps my tongue, fails me at the last hurdle.
[2] And no, I don't know why either.
[3] Our fault - we're arriving a day later than we really ought to. Blame Christmas.
[4] The Western Approach Road is apparently verboten to cyclists, at least if the beeps from cars are anything to go by, although the only indication of this that I've been able to find on roadsigns is that all the bus lane signs have had the pictures of the bicycles covered over.