Friday, 11th Jan

I had a slight headache before bed last night, so got an ibuprofen from Tomi. Slept well until 5.30, after which I couldn't get back to sleep, in part because Jeremy was still fast asleep and snoring. Felt nauseous after breakfast and threw up the two cups of tea that I'd drunk, but managed to keep down the food. Tomi supplied an anti-nausea tablet, which helped. I also decided to start using chlorine tablets in my water. Up here, there aren't any meltwater streams, so we're drinking melted snow. Lito has advised us several times that it doesn't taste good and we should add some orange flavouring to it, but I prefer to drink water (and don't want the hassle of cleaning out my Camelbak after the trip). Our friends Damien and Ali, who climbed Aconcagua in 2011, had a bad reaction to the water at Confluencia and advised us to take enough chlorine tablets to cover the whole trip. We hadn't needed them to date and I was gearing up for an extended bout of mockery on our return, but now I’m glad I have them. It’s probably psychological; the taste of the tablet is very faint, but it’s enough to convince my brain that this water is somehow different from water without the tablets [1].

Anyway, Tomi's tablet did the job and, despite feeling pretty grim, I was ready to go. As an aside, the only reason I can remember this incident is that I wrote it down. I know that I was feeling queasy for most of the time above 5,500m, because I remember asking Tomi for more pills, but I had no recollection of being that bad until I read my diary for the day. I do remember feeling much better at altitude this time round than I did when I was over 5,000m in the Khumbu on the way to EBC, and being sure that I had coped better. For instance, after EBC I was determined that I wasn't going to go any higher, because I was sure I would feel grim. But despite having objectively worse symptoms (I never threw up in the Khumbu [6]) , my memory of Aconcagua is that I coped better with altitude. Perhaps it’s just a matter of knowing what to expect.

The climb out of Nido is up a dauntingly steep-looking slope that we’d seen people descending the night before. Tackling a slope like this at altitude, your body goes through three distinct phases. First, the anaerobic phase. Your body at rest is nicely oxygenated, not quite as it would be at sea level, but enough that you’re not feeling much stress. The initial bit of the climb uses up this oxygen, and you just have time to think “Hey, this isn't so bad” before you've used it up, about five steps later. Then there’s that transitional bit where you’re switching from anaerobic to aerobic respiration. You’ll know it if you've ever been jogging: that bit where you feel exhausted, burned out and want to stop, and you’d stop if you weren't an embarrassingly short distance from where you started. There are two problems with this at altitude. The first is that it takes a really long time – what feels like several minutes - to get through it. I’ll come onto the second one later. Finally, you get into aerobic respiration as best you can and find that you can keep going steadily for an indefinite period. This is actually quite cool because it dawns on you that you’re already at extreme altitude, every step takes you another ten, fifteen, twenty centimetres further into that extreme zone, and if you just keep doing this – which you’re sure you can – then before too long you’ll be on the summit and there probably won’t be anyone else standing anywhere higher than you. At this point, under normal circumstances, your brain might be inclined to mentally high-five itself and go “Heck yeah! You’re a mountaineer, baby! You’re a high altitude athlete!” but this would require too much oxygen, so mostly what you feel is a kind of determined satisfaction. [8] It is at this point that the second problem kicks in.

Something changes. This happens surprisingly frequently. Maybe you stop to take a photo, or you’re crossing a rocky bit that needs you to use a different set of muscles, or you miss your footing. Maybe you just took a sip from your Camelbak [10]. Suddenly, you are out of aerobic balance and back to stage two – except that you didn't have any anaerobic capacity to spare so all you can do is struggle on and breathe harder [11] until you recover.

At the top of the initial slope, we paused for another stunning view of the Andes, and then pressed on up another stiff slope. This one took us past bare rock, I think for the first time on the climb. Occasionally we would pass a patch of distinctive, and very soft, yellow sandstone which crumbled under our feet. It looked like it had the remains of razorshells embedded it – striking evidence that the rocks we were walking over today, nearly 6,000m above the surface of the sea, had once been under it.

We arrived quite suddenly at the crest of the slope, and a slightly incongruous wooden hut. I was taken aback when Lito told us that this was the Berlin refuge – it didn't seem that we had climbed nearly enough to reach it. We stopped for a welcome snack [12], and I felt that it was only appropriate to make a rendition of “Take my breath away”. This was not received well by the group [13]. I briefly considered continuing along the Top Gun soundtrack by suggesting to Jeremy that Vicky had, perhaps, lost that loving feeling, or switching from a song by Berlin to one about Berlin (“Wilkommen” from Cabaret). Fortunately, while for me the first symptom of high altitude cerebral edema would seem to be wanting to sing, the second is not being able to remember the lyrics.

Around a rock bluff from the hut was Berlin campsite, but Lito prefers to camp at Camp Colera (literal translation: “Angry Camp”. No idea why it’s called that), which is only a little distance away along a short traverse that concludes in a scramble up some rocks. At sea level, this would be a doddle even with a heavy pack, but at this altitude it is frankly terrifying. It’s a struggle to work out where the footholds are for your suddenly unwieldy plastic boots, and the fear of falling is accentuated by the fear that, having fallen, you could slide down the slope for quite a way before stopping. Fortunately, someone has fixed a wire handhold along the length of the scramble.

We arrive to another mountain plateau with another stunning view, and veg out in our tents until dinner time. For the first time, we are sharing with other groups [14], but Tomi and the porters have secured a decent spot.

Over dinner – I didn't record what it was, but it might have been soup, frankfurters and mash again – we discuss plans for tomorrow. The fact that we've come up to Colera means that tomorrow will be our summit day – if we were waiting for a weather window, we would do it at Nido – and Lito tells us that they will wake us at 3 am for a 4 am start. Apparently a snowstorm is approaching, and Lito wants to give us the best chance of getting up and back again ahead of it. He tells us to prepare for twelve to fourteen hours of walking, and they hand out chocolate, biscuits and sweets for us to have for breakfast. I grab a big bar of chocolate, knowing that biscuits will be too dry for me early in the morning. I also have a secret weapon stashed in my pack: three slabs of Kendal Mint Cake [15].

That evening I made a provisional list of what I was going to wear and carry the next day. In the end, I simplified things a lot, particularly after having listened to a loud American guide giving an extended briefing to his clients, who were camped next to us. Anyway, with a 3 am start ahead of us, I wanted to try to get some sleep so it was lights out at 10pm to try to get some shut-eye. But that is another story.

[1] Learned Taste Aversion, as we psychologists [2] call it, is actually one of the strongest mind-over-matter effects we know of. If you feed a rat (or the mammal of your choice) a new taste, and then inject it with something that makes it ill, it will avoid that taste and it’s very hard to persuade it that it’s OK. It’s a sensible trait to have evolved. If those berries make you sick, don’t eat ‘em again. I suspect that, if we’re honest, many of us have an example of it in our lives. I, for instance, won’t touch Bacardi after a particularly unpleasant experience when I was younger. [5] 

[2] BA Hons, Experimental Psychology, Oxon. 1990-1993 [3] [4]

[3] Bet you wouldn't have guessed if I hadn't told you.

[4] Psychology being psychology, this is long enough ago that everything I learned will by now have been accepted into orthodoxy, discredited, forgotten, reinvented, rediscovered, accepted into orthodoxy again and is probably even now on the way to being discredited once again.

[5] But not, sadly, so young that I shouldn't have known better.

[6] A phrase which sounds much less savoury when I read it back than when it was in my head. But, as I can only imagine Mike Batt thought when he wrote Katie Melua's song Half-way Up The Hindu Kush[7], it’s out there now, and I’m sticking with it.

[7] I still find it hard to believe that there is a song out there with the repeated refrain “Thank you for taking me half-way up the Hindu Kush”. It’s a sort of trompe l'oeil of Carry On grade smut. You know that the song does not at any point include the words “Khyber Pass”, but your brain knows that that was exactly what he was thinking, with the same kind of certainty that led Margaret Thatcher to introduce the poll tax. I mean, I even typed “Khyber Pass” initially as the name of the song, and had to correct myself when I started typing the lyric.

[8] It is possible that Americans on Aconcagua actually do think this kind of stuff, which may be why so many stupid and avoidable tragedies seem to happen to Americans. [9]

[9] Though the statistician in me is at pains to point out that it’s more likely to be because Americans make up the largest percentage of foreign climbers, and therefore the largest group who have both limited exposure to Aconcagua horror stories and limited Spanish.

[10] This is surprisingly hard to do at altitude, because you have to stop breathing while you take a sip, and when each breath gets you around half the amount of oxygen that you’re used to, that is a Bad Thing. Even worse, you then have to blow the water in the tube back into the reservoir, because if you don’t it will freeze. So not only do you have to stop breathing, but you have to expend effort and get air out of your lungs. Taking a sip of water can leave you gasping for breath for several seconds afterwards. But you do it anyway, because while gasping is a Bad Thing, it is temporary, whereas dehydration is a Worse Thing, because it can ruin your whole trip.

[11] That’s hyperventilating. Which is bad, remember, because of alkalosis.

[12] The favourite among the assortment of sweets and biscuits that we’d been handed was a sort of Wagon Wheel (remember them?) but with dulce de leche in place of marshmallow. This is an inspired change, and somehow makes the snack feel considerably more suitable for adults.

[13] Those of you who have had the misfortune to hear me sing will understand why. But I should make it clear that while in my hands (or rather vocal chords) the word “rendition” carries overtones of both the original, musical and more modern, extradition-and-torture-tinged meaning of the word, my services have not at any point been deployed by the CIA. Some things are simply too inhumane to consider.

[14] There’s also no toilet niche. The solution is a little package that contains a bag with chemicals, a few sheets of paper, a hygienic wipe, and another bag to put it all into when you are done. It’s a little fiddly but keeps the mountain clean (the porters will take it down in the rubbish bags when we break camp). Sadly, it’s clear from the state of the various rock niches behind the camp that not everyone is this fastidious. This is a real shame. At this altitude, above the glaciers with very little animal life and not enough warmth for bacteria to do their thing, waste of all kinds can hang around for years. It is a big issue on Aconcagua, which is why they've instituted the idea that you bring your waste down with you (remember the numbered bags?). Unfortunately, as long as you bring down something the park authorities have know way of telling whether you've brought down everything.

[15] Complete with testimonial from the 1953 Everest Expedition – “the only complaint was that there wasn't more of it”. I can see why. It’s easy to carry and eat, has a strong taste that doesn't pall at altitude, and boosts your blood sugar instantly. On the EBC trek we were struggling up Kala Patthar (the highest climb of the trip, which gives you great views of Everest and the valley) and I realised that we had only been given a cup of tea and a biscuit for breakfast, and everybody’s blood sugar was low. I started giving little bits of Kendal Mint Cake to the group and it was almost cartoon-like how people would eat it and immediately shoot off up the hill. Like Road Runner. But in slow motion and with walking poles.

Thursday, 10th January

Awoke after a good-ish night's sleep, given the altitude and that it's our first night in smaller tents. At this point, the importance of a good pee strategy at altitude should be reiterated, however indelicate the subject may be.

Skip this bit if you're not interested or find it icky.

To recap: your body acclimatises by getting rid of bicarbonate from your bloodstream, and it does that via the kidneys. So you have a dilemma. If you want to acclimatise, you will generally need to pee three or four times during the night, but that means getting out of your nice warm sleeping bag and your nice warm tent and staggering about in your pyjamas in the cold and dark. The answer to this is to have a way of having your pee without going outside the tent. Since no-one has yet invented a lightweight, cold-proof plumbing solution [1], the standard answer for mountaineers the world over is to have a receptacle in the tent that saves you having to go outside during the night.

Said receptacle needs to have a number of characteristics:

• A wide opening, to avoid aiming problems [3]
• Easy to open
• Easy and secure to close
• Large enough capacity to last the night
• Sufficiently different from your drinking water receptacles to avoid confusion.

On the way to EBC, I'd used a standard Nalgene bottle in a distinctive colour, which ticked most of the boxes but only held 1L - enough to avoid one trip outside, but not two or more. But a 2L bottle is a big thing to carry, so this time I had a Camelbak-plastic-bag-style reservoir from Source. This folded down small, had a 2L capacity and an opening the full width of the bag that closed by folding over the top and sliding a plastic bar across to clip it shut. It needed a little care to make sure it was properly open before use and hadn't folded back up again, but it meant that I stayed warm in the tent all night.

OK, you can start reading again now.

Anyway, it seems that despite all precautions, my body only wants 6 hours sleep a night, so I woke up early and read for a bit until everyone else started getting up. Breakfast was biscuits and tea, but I wasn't that hungry.

The porters came at 10 to take the tents, so we scurried around for 40 minutes before then packing our bags and dismantling the tents. Once they'd gone, we set of for Nido de Condores. Nido isn't quite visible from Canada, but the route to it is. You go up the zigzags, aiming for a prominent saddle between two large outcrops of rock, and then up and over a little way.

About an hour and 150 vertical metres in, we stopped for a drink at some rocks and drama ensued. My camera slipped off its belt loop and lodged behind Tomi's pack. When he next picked up the pack, the camera began bouncing down the slope. All we could do was watch: there was no way to catch up to it while it was moving, certainly not safely. We shouted down the slope to other climbers we could see, and one eventually stopped it - well over 100m below us. Tomi made an heroic trip up and down the slope to bring it back, while I stood around and felt embarrassed and everyone else got cold. He made it back up to us in about half an hour, and we inspected the damage. The polarising filter on the front of the lens had cracked, there was some damage to the LCD, but if I took the filter off I was still able to take pictures. Considering what it had been through, not too bad. Unfortunately, I later realised that there was something up with the autofocus. I suspect one of the lens elements has been knocked out of alignment and every photo from here on in is a bit blurry.

Still, I hope you will agree that the photos I'd already taken were well worth saving, and join me in thanking Tomi for rescuing them.

We pressed on without further incident, making our way up the slope and crossing a number of meltwater streams until we reached the breakpoint where the steep slope becomes a gentler saddle. This was something of a crossroads for parties on the mountain; we were one of only a number going up, looking enviously at various groups who'd reached the summit in the good weather of the last couple of days and were now coming down. Every so often we would see a group where one of the members was being nursed down the slope by the others - a reminder [4] of just hard the next couple of days

The trek into Nido ended with a long traverse across a wide slope up to the campsite. Unlike Yacob, who was sprinting ahead of us to shoot video of our arrival,  I was very tired by the end of it and really glad to get my boots off and into the tent. The group had slowed right down by the time we hit the traverse, and paradoxically I felt I could have gone a fair bit faster and might have felt better if I had. I'm not sure if that makes physiological, logical or indeed English sense, but that's how it felt.

Nido itself is a spectacular campsite, a broad plateau that drops away sharply. For the first time, you can see the whole of Cuerno, including its east ridge and the glacial bowl to its north, followed by the chain of the Andes stretching away to the horizon. Cuerno looms above Mulas and Canada and the rest of the range is hidden behind it. Nido, at 5,570m comfortably into the "extreme" altitude category, looks down on Cuerno in much the same way that John Cleese looked down on Ronnie Barker in the Frost Report. This was the first time we had seen the Andes in all their glory.

Because a lot of people had come down from the mountain that day, Nido was fairly empty, the remaining tents dotted in between the rings of stones that mark pitches [6]. Grajales, as you have probably guessed, have a separate campsite, on a smaller plateau a few metres higher than Nido proper [7]. Dinner was frankfurters and mash, and several of us had seconds, adding further evidence to my theory that processed food is what you need at altitude. Sunset was, predictably, spectacular (and also the only thing my camera got in focus).

[1] Now there's an idea... actually, we did discuss this several times on the trip. Modern rucksacks assume that you will have a Camelbak or suchlike and have a little "H20" slit that allows the tube to get from inside to out. Why shouldn't tents have the same, only for liquid to get out of you rather than in? I suppose it all depends on what you regard as a suitable distance from the tent for your fluids to end up [2] and therefore how much pipe you need to carry.

[2] Note: this distance gets smaller as you get higher. Which may be important, because the distance before it starts freezing in the pipe also goes down.

[3] As Jeremy discovered in a nearly-disastrous experiment, a mineral water bottle just won't cut it late at night. Not without a funnel.

[4] Well, I suppose strictly speaking "harbinger" would be a better word [5], but it really sounded odd and archaic, especially in the context of a blog. I wonder what @DrSamuelJohnson would make of it?

[5] Unless you have deja vu or have travelled back in time from a point after you'd done the climb. Or have done it before, but why would anyone do that?

[6] I think I've explained before that at this altitude tents are anchored with stones rather than tent pegs. Guylines, and the edges of the flysheet will be weighted with decent sized-rocks, and sometimes they will even be put in the inners to provide extra protection against the wind. Getting back from the summit to find that your tent has blown away would be a Very Bad Thing - potentially fatal - so, in the words of They Might Be Giants, everybody wants a rock to wind a piece of string around. Of course, when you strike camp, you just unwind the string and roll the rocks off the flysheet, so good pitches become defined by rings of stones around them like the remains of miniature dry stone walls.

[7] And yes, it has its own toilet arrangements. But this one faces the mountain, so Canada wins the prize for loo with a view.

Wednesday, 9th January

I woke feeling good but slightly nervous. My pack for the day weighed in, at a guess, at about 16kg - less than several of the group, and relative to bodyweight probably the lightest. Vicky and Carlos had especially huge packs, made even larger by the fact that they want to minimise the number of days on which they are using plastic boots, so are wearing their lighter boots or shoes and have strapped them to the outside of the pack.

Lito compensated for the loads with a slower-than-usual pace, but we were still at Canada in about 3 hours. The porters had arrived there ahead of us and set up the tents, and had already headed back to Mulas by the time we arrived.

I enjoyed our lunch of salami, cheese, biscuits, olives, Pringles - a combination that would be a recurrent theme while we were high on the mountain. However, I wasn't that hungry, and didn't eat too much. Also, like Burley in The Ascent of Rum Doodle (and, for that matter, Jeremy), I seemed to be suffering from altitude lassitude and wasn't that interested in following when Lito and several of the others set off in search of water. The one downside of Grajales' dedicated camp is that it's a fair way from any water source, and eventually they returned with bags filled from a distant stream and a snow patch some way above us.

The tents were classic North Face mountain tents with plenty of room for 2 people inside. There'd been some debate at base camp about who would end up sharing with George (who had actually been asked to move from the big bunk tents to a solo tent because his snoring was keeping people awake), but Tomi and Lito had clearly decided not to break up the natural pairings, so Yacob and Carlos took one tent, Jeremy and I the second and left the third for Vicky to share with George. I lent her some earplugs, not entirely in jest.

I had decided to bring two sleeping mats with me - a self-inflating one and a foam one. This presented packing issues because the foam one was light but too bulky even to go under the straps of my pack, but meant that there was a lot of insulation - both thermal and cushioning - between me and the ground. With a smaller volume to heat compared to the bunk tents, it also turned out that we were warmer high on the mountain than at Mulas. My one concern was trying to stay out of range of Jeremy's coughing - he hadn't managed to shake his cold, and I was keen not to develop one.

Flor came up to visit late in the afternoon and revealed her guiding ambitions, but sadly had to go back down before she could cook us dinner... Tomi's first effort as head chef was pasta with some kind of canned sauce, and it was perfectly acceptable. Sachets of instant soup also went down very well. It's a bit like the "testing diet" [1] - just right for the circumstances. On the trek to Everest Base Camp, dinner was typically pasta in a fresh tomato sauce, but it was just too insipid to stimulate our altitude-anaesthetised taste buds. We would have happily eaten dhal bhat in preference. The guides on Aconcagua have realised what the sherpas haven't: that a few days of processed food, salt and flavour enhancers won't kill you, and will in fact do you some good because you will be willing to eat much more of it. Above 5,000m, calories matter. How you get them doesn't (see [1]). [4]

In the evening, we stayed out through the sunset with our cameras working overtime. I stood in one place and took a photo of Aconcagua every 5 minutes to try to capture the changing colours, made more complicated by the fact that the sunset itself also demanded a photo. The Andean sunset is famous for the layers of colour it creates in the sky (so much so that the Patagonia kit company designed its logo around it) but the layering of blues and greys in the mountains themselves is equally impressive, if much subtler. The dusk renders the ranges into silhouettes in varying shades, bringing out the shapes of the top of the ranges and accentuating how they have emerged from a single set of strata. You can line up the different peaks by eye and see how similar each range is to the one behind it, something that is harder to do in full daylight when the shapes and colours of individual mountains predominate.

And so to a comfy, high-altitude bed, with my untried but hopefully trusty pee bottle by my side.

[1] It is a well known truth among IT and project types that once the rubber hits the road and everyone is working late (generally the testing phase, hence the name), the only acceptable food choice is pizza and other takeaway food, washed down with cola (preferably Jolt). It is actively unhealthy to eat anything else. Fact. [2]

[2] It is also a well established truth that anything you read on the internet that is suffixed by "Fact." is, in actuality, utterly wrong. Fact. [3]

[3] Oxbridge Interview Question: "Is [2] a fact?"

[4] Unless, of course, you are a rugby team who've been in a plane crash in the Andes. Then it is still important to get those calories, but how you get them might matter, at least afterwards when what you get paid for the film rights is probably nowhere near enough to pay for the cost of years of therapy. (And yes, I am looking at you Martin Hepworth. The film's called Alive. And no, I didn't have to look that up, but I thought you'd appreciate the link)

Tuesday, 8th January, Part 2

I forgot to mention in last night's post (hey, it was late in the evening), that the end of the day was enlivened by the sight of several guides and porters wandering the camp with broom handles and occasionally stabbing with them behind various rocks.

It turned out that they'd uncovered an enclave of rats and were trying to stamp them out. I don't think they managed to catch them, so I'd be inclined to say that I don't think they exist, except that I caught one brief glimpse of one of the critters and it looked unusually large, sleek, furry and incongruously strawberry blonde. The sight of the Grajales staff pursuing these rodents of unusual size provided a small amount of entertainment, although I should say for the benefit of those of my readers who are fans of The Princess Bride [1], that there was no sign of either lightning sand or fire spurts in base camp.

[1] Inconceivable? Not really. Since dropping a casual reference to the Dread Pirate Roberts into a discussion at last week's team meeting, I've discovered a high proportion of fans of the Morgenstern among my work colleagues.

Tuesday, 8th January

A second rest day before we go up the mountain for our summit push, mainly spent reading. By the end of the day I've completed another Mark Horrell, reacquainted myself with Rum Doodle [1] and read most of Thunderball. We also fell into a long group discussion about Everest, the fates of Mallory and Irvine, and the 1996 and 2006 disasters on the mountain.

We left that happy subject to get our kit together and undergo a final kit check. Tomi gives mine the OK and expresses his approval of my down mittens: no brand, $10 from a shop in Kathmandu, but wonderfully warm. Possibly the best value bit of kit I've ever bought. He also likes my inner boots; Scarpa Vegas have been a staple of high altitude mountaineering for about a decade, but recently Scarpa has started making extra warm inners designed specifically for extreme altitude. My second hand pair came with both the standard inners and pair of unused high altitude ones. I was having a little trouble on the descent yesterday because the lacing on the boots makes it hard to lock your feet in tightly enough that your toes don't smash into the front of the boot. Tomi offers a strip of old sleeping mat as a possible answer and it seems to be working.

Gear duly checked, we turn to packing our rucksacks. There is much discussion and comparison of how much weight we will each be carrying. Carlos is travelling heavy, in part because he is videoing the trip and needs to carry his video paraphernalia and a laptop onto which to download it. At the other end of the scale, Jeremy is travelling as light as he can, in part because there's only so much he can cram into his rucksack. I'm somewhere in the middle, but my crude confidence check is that if I am sat at our dining table, I can reach behind me and lift the rucksack one handed.

We go to the medical hut for a final check-up before we go. My O2 Sat has risen to 90%, my pulse rate has fallen to 86 and blood pressure is also down a little at 145/90. This is deemed good enough for me to press on upwards. The rest of the team is also declared good to go. The doctors advise me to take off my wedding ring in case my fingers swell [2]. It's only later that I realise it's my wedding anniversary. Taking one's wedding ring off is an odd way to celebrate it.

My choice of aspirin over ibuprofen as a high-altitude analgesic and prophylactic becomes the subject of another long discussion with April. Just before Christmas I completed two pilot projects with my employer's Life Sciences team in which we educated actuaries about developments in heart attack treatments. April's boyfriend is a doctor of the kind that Americans call "Internists" - that is, a specialist in internal medicine - and so we are able to talk in the medical jargon and understand each other. She's also into statistics and evidence-based medicine, so I recommend Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science" and "Bad Pharma".

As the sun creeps towards the skyline, Vicky translates for us a description of the summit day route. It has three phases: a series of zigzags; La Traversa, which takes us across the face of the mountain; and La Canaleta and the summit ridge - a steep, rocky climb up to the summit pyramid. No great surprises, I suppose, but it starts to bring the challenge of summit day to life in our minds.

One last night at base camp, and we're off.

[1] I'd forgotten just how funny it is - the opening planning meeting, which features an argument about whether a 3-ton steam hammer constitutes essential equipment and repeated telegrams from the group's navigation and linguistic expert, who gets progressively more lost as the meeting goes on, had me snorting with laughter.

[2] This happened to my brother-in-law on honeymoon in Bhutan. They ended up taking his wedding ring off with a drill, because the alternative was taking his finger off.

Monday, 7th January

Right. Time to get serious. First time high on Aconcagua itself; first time in plastic boots. Lito and Tomi have decided that we won't take any actual gear up for fear that it might get nicked, so we are each given a 3kg load of food to take up instead.

The big advantage of heading to Canada instead of Cerro Bonete is that the climb starts - steeply - literally metres outside base camp. You cross a small string of penitentes, and then you're on the mountain and going up. Tomi sets a well-judged pace that's easy to keep up with until the last half hour, when we're picking our way through what from below feel like a set of rocky outcrops but from above look like much steeper cliffs. We get up to the camp in two-and-a-half hours versus the regulation three. Not bad.

Grajales - and we'll discover that this is a recurring theme - don't like to camp with other parties, so they have set up their own Canada a few hundred metres' traverse along the mountains face from the main one. They have their own cache of food and equipment, their own tent pitches - levelled and each equipped with a "deadman" [1], and - perhaps most importantly - their own toilet arrangements. There is a little three sided screen perched in a notch between some rocks on the edge of the cliff. Inside it is an aluminium frame with a loo seat to which a bin bag is clipped. It's basic, but it works and it's ours. It also has the best view of any loo I've ever used.

We have a lunch of cheese, salami and crackers, and lounge around while the sun is still high. I lose heat quickly and realise I need to rethink my layering strategy. I need to have my down jacket to wear and stop me cooling down too much, and be more careful to wear an outer layer that will breathe well.

On the way down. Tomi is worried by my technique and advises me to use a much shorter walking pole on the mountain-facing side. However, once we're past the initial, rocky bit, I feel much more secure and, since we're on scree, we can go back to the "skiing down an escalator" technique that I used yesterday. In fact, I find that the plastic boots, which I've barely noticed on the up, come into their own on the way down. The rigid ankle support gives you much more confidence because it's so much harder to injure yourself.

We're back at camp mid-afternoon, and the eReader has finally given up the ghost. Not even an afternoon in the sun with a heat pack has revived its battery. Damn, I was over 90% of the way through Monte Cristo. Now it will have to wait for when I'm back in the UK. I whizz through my first Mark Horrell (The Wrath of the Turquoise Goddess - he's good at titles, though the drama of the books never quite lives up to them) instead, and onto Will Greenwood's autobiography, which is intermittently hilarious because he's used parts of it as a means to get back at Austin Healey for various practical joked committed over the years.

Tonight we are sharing our sleeping tent with April, an Alaskan who now lives in California, works as an independent guide and has just climbed Aconcagua from the other side. Her clients got as far as Plaza Argentina (essentially base camp on that side) and decided to fly out again, so she went up on her own. She's declared the conditions to be the warmest and calmest she's seen in three or four trips; we hope the weather holds for us. A strangely rambling conversation begins that various people fade in and out of, and which covers mountaineering, music and podcasts. April hasn't had a tv since 2001, so she relies a lot on podcasts for information. I can't stand podcasts, mainly because I can read faster than people narrate things, but it turns out we are interested in many of the same things despite very different modes of consumption. She's also very into new music, so I offer to connect her with some of my friends in the music community.

[1] A heavy rock or weight buried in the ground with a loop of rope around it. It provides a point to fix the tent to that won't blow away in high winds. Even so, the other tent guys are looped around rocks of various sizes to keep them secure.

6 Jan, Part 2

(Sorry, no photos to go with this one - but wait for tomorrow's)

A bit of a routine is forming for afternoons in base camp. The big geodesic tent is warm, at least when the sun is out, and comfortable, with beanbags to lounge on, so most of us have taken to spending our afternoons there with our books and water bottles, dozing off from time to time. I've made it into Volume II of the Count of Monte Cristo, but my eReader's battery is struggling with the cold. It's showing no bars left, and if it gets too cold overnight, it decides that it has no battery left at all and shuts down. So I have taken to slipping a handwarmer into its case, leaving it in the sun in the mornings and keeping it in my sleeping bag at night to eke a little more juice out of it. I'm planning to switch over to my kindle when we move to the higher camps, and move from Napoleonic derring-do to a mixture of rugby autobiographies [1], mountaineering books [2] and James Bond [4].

Anyway, the fun tent is a good place to think about what's ahead. Musing on what we have left to do, it's all a bit daunting. Tomorrow's climb to Camp Canada will basically be the same vertical gain (and descent) as today, and then we have to do it again, followed by the moves to Nido de Condores and Colera - each of which is 500m of gain - and summit day itself, a further 1,000m up and down. We then descend from Colera to Mulas in one move. However, Jeremy and I have been recommended to use our plastic boots from tomorrow, so that we are familiar with them on summit day. They are considerably heavier than walking boots and apparently 1 kilo on the feet is equivalent to 5 on the back, so it could be hard work. I am beginning to wonder if I should have splashed out on some lighter boots like Scarpa Infernos [5]. We will find out tomorrow.

The acclimatisation walk has done us a lot of good, though. The headaches and other symptoms we had have mosty gone. Jeremy is still struggling with his cold and has been to the doctor again; they've said it's normal and given him some ibuprofen. Vicky is still icing her ankle. Otherwise, everyone is fine. I realise I haven't had much water today, though, and up my intake. I discovered before Christmas that one of my colleagues at work, Ed, had tried to climb Aconcagua but got dehydrated on the climb to Canada and had to go down. Ed is much fitter than me, so I am taking his cautionary tale quite seriously.

I didn't make a note of it in my notes, but sometime in this period at base camp we sort-of-gatecrash a lecture on Acute Mountain Sickness being held by the doctors. Vicky has heard about it through her friends among the Grajales guides, and so we invite ourselves along. It turns out that a) it was really intended for guides, porters and other Aconcagua professionals; b) the Ranger hut where we held it gets very crowded; c) it's conducted in rapid Spanish and although there's a powerpoint presentation that I can follow bits of, it's displayed on a tiny screen and I can't read most of the text. We arrived on time (unlike everyone else [7]) and were sat in the middle of the room, making it hard to get out. I sit through most of it, and pick up as much as I can, but eventually the effect of trying not to suffer Ed-like dehydration takes its inevitable toll and it is a bit of a relief to escape to the loo.

Most of what they discussed I already knew in some form or other. However, I did learn something I genuinely did not know. I knew that the Aconcagua community had a big downer on Diamox, but I hadn't realised it had been superseded by another wonder drug. The doctor showed the results of a study - at Everest Base Camp - in which three groups were given different treatments and checked for symptoms of Acute Mountain Sickness. From memory, just under 50% of the placebo group suffered symptoms. With Diamox, this dropped to the mid 30%s, but the only 26% of the group on the other treatment experienced symptoms. Furthermore, the drug they were on had far fewer side-effects than Diamox. The name of this miracle treatment?

Ibuprofen. Of which, naturally, I have brought precisely none. Still, my aspirins seem to be working, and everyone else seems to have tons of the stuff, with pills stuffed with doses two or three times what you can buy in the UK. I can almost certainly cadge some if I need it.

It also emerges that Vicky, on top of finding out about the presentation and the equipment sale, has agreed to be part of a "secret friend" game with the guides and porters. It's what in the UK we would call "secret Santa". Everyone puts their name in the hat, pulls out someone else's name, and gives that person an anonymous present. Vicky has drawn one of the porters, and this has given her a big problem: she doesn't have any spare kit that she can turn into a present. I offer a pack of cards, which apparently won't cut it, but we eventually work out that the best bet is one of my spare pairs of sunglasses. I've been using my trusty Oakleys so far, but I'd also picked up a pair of official glacier glasses (with foam seals to stop light creeping into your eyes from around the edges) cheaply on Amazon before I came out. Given that I've also got spare Oakleys and a pair of ski goggles for summit day, it's a small sacrifice. We agree that she can buy the celebratory wine back in Mendoza, and I hand them over. Apparently they are well received by their ultimate target.

And so, with an ailing eReader, a full camlebak and two aspirin, to bed.

[1] For the record, I will get through Will Greenwood and Sir Ian McGeechan's autobiographies on the trip

[2] 3 of Mark Horrell's Footsteps on the Mountain eBooks (basically, compiled from his blogs of climbs in various parts of the world). I found them when looking for a book that captured what it was actually like to climb Aconcagua, and at under a quid "The True Peruvian Route" was not exactly a gamble. They're fairly well written, feature some amusing real-life characters [3], not too demanding to read, and they're cheap. Recommended if you want a sense of what mountaineering is actually like.

I also read Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind, about how the perception of mountains and what they are for has changed over the years, and revisited W. E. Bowman's classic The Ascent of Rum Doodle (an account of an expedition to the fictional highest mountain in the world, Rum Doodle. The more you know about mountaineering, the funnier it becomes).

[3] One of whom, "Big Richard" in "The Wrath of the Turquoise Goddesss", we realise is a friend of Jeremy's whom I have briefly met at a rugby match.

[4] Thunderball and OHMSS, which are surprisingly close to the films, The Man with the Golden Gun, which isn't, and Octopussy & The Living Daylights, three short stories of which one provides nothing more than the title for the film of the same name, the second provides a MacGuffin for Octopussy and the third provides a decent chunk of The Living Daylights. There is a pretty good correlation between how much of Fleming's original plot gets reused and how good the resultant film is, with an honourable exception for The Man with the Golden Gun (the plot of the film is deeply silly, but it's redeemed by having Christopher Lee in it and quite possibly the best car stunt ever filmed).

[5] Though Vicky says they probably aren't warm enough for Aconcagua. Apparently the "in" boots among guides are La Sportiva Spantiks. A Japanese party were selling gear to raise cash for a helicopter flight out [6], and had a pair in Vicky's size, but the guides had first pick and someone else bought them.

[6] Yours for $1,500, squire, but it will carry 3 people. Bargain.

[7] I am reminded of the joke about a Spaniard who asks an Irishman whether Irish has a word equivalent to the Spanish "manana" and receives the reply "Well, we have several, but none with quite the same sense of urgency."

Sunday, 6th January, Part 1

Sorry for being a bit slow with this post - I'll try and get another one out this evening and get caught up a bit.

On 6th Jan, we did an "acclimatisation walk" to climb Cerro Bonete. At 5,005m, it doesn't sound that high, but it's still 650m above base camp, so at the very least it will be a hard workout.

The first part of the route is "Nepali flat" [1] over to the Base Camp Hotel and ranger station, where Lito checks in to let them know what we're doing. Across the ranger station's helipad (well, an area of clear ground marked by a ring of stones), the true climb begins with a very steep zigzag up a scree slope. You can see much of the route from Mulas, but it doesn't give you much sense of the steepness, or of how loose the ground is underfoot.

After 150m of near-vertical slope, it flattens out for a bit and it's more Nepali flat across a ridge line until we reach a small stream where we paused for a snack. At this point a lone guy in a red jacket with a much bigger pack went past us and off up the next slope. A few minutes later, we followed him. Lito was setting a punishing pace that was judged just at the edge of sustainability. Zig, dig your pole in at the corner, swing round, zag. Repeat.

Eventually, we hit a zig (or maybe it's a zag) that goes off at a slightly different angle and find ourselves on the shoulder of the mountain, just below the rocky summit pyramid and the view is astounding. We're on an arrete [2], capped by a field of penitentes, that sits between what we can now see are two huge glacial bowls. To our right, the Andes stretch away to the horizon and Chile. To the left, we can see where we've come from, little ant-tracks up the side of an immense slope. Dead ahead, we can see the valley we climbed two days ago to reach Mulas and, of course, Aconcagua itself.

We rest here for a bit, take a few photos. Red jacket, who we've passed going up the slope [3], overtakes us again, and presses on to the summit. Eventually we follow. Tomi is leading this time, and the route isn't so clear. It looks as if there are several possible paths to the summit, picking our way across and over bigger rocks, but finding the clearest one is a bit of an art. At one point, he changes his mind about the route and we reverse direction and take a different fork that leads us over the edge of the face we've been climbing and onto the final clamber to the summit.

If the view before was astounding, this is even more so. This is the view I came here to see: mountains arrayed below me like strips of Toblerone under a blanket, with the vast bulk of Aconcagua standing above us. Photos are duly taken, including this panoramic one that I'm really proud of. The routes up to the first two high camps were clearly visible from our vantage point, and Lito pointed them out. It looks daunting from this distance.

It turns out that red jacket is sponsored by a new-ish gear company called Berg, and a couple of others, and asks if we can take some photos of him at the summit. All eyes in our team turn to me. I'm fine with it, but after the 6th or 7th configuration of man + gear + sponsor's flag, it is getting a bit much. Eventually, we're done and I get to eat some lunch.

The way down is actually trickier than the way up. Particularly on the steep upper slopes I am finding it hard to put my feet in places that will hold my weight. I fall a couple of times, with no damage other than to my pride, but it still shakes me a bit. The next bit is more fun, and the purpose of the more direct slopes becomes clear: because they are loose, you can go down them in great sliding steps. Initially, shaken by my tumbles, I continue on the zigzags, but the others are getting a long way ahead, so eventually I join them. The trick is to manage your centre of gravity so that it's stable when you're moving rapidly downhill, and to manage your feet so that they don't get caught in the scree and rocks and trip you up. After a bit of trial and error, I settle on walking with my toes up, digging my heels into the ground and bending my knees slightly so that my weight is lower to the ground. It feels a bit like walking down a giant escalator.

At the end of the slopes, the stream where we stopped for a snack has become a torrent of meltwater as the sun has warmed the glaciers above. It takes a bit of exploration to find a way across. Yacob, Jeremy and Carlos jumped across from a high rock. The rest of us, less daring, took the time to pick our way across.

The trog from the Ranger station back to base camp was surprisingly hard. For one thing, penitentes fields are harder to pick your way through going uphill than going downhill, but also the gently undulating ground was actually quite hard going, at altitude, after a hard day's climb. We were very relieved to make it back to base camp.


[1] That is, constant small ups and downs without any major altitude gain.
[2] A ridge, typically joining two peaks, that's been eaten away by glaciers from both sides to create a knife-edge.

[3] The zigzags are crossed by other paths offering a slightly more direct route. He was toiling up these, but the longer way round is clearly the way to go. Lito has a word with him when our paths cross, and he amends his line.

Saturday, 5th January

Rest day in Plaza de Mulas, which you would think would be quiet, but the day was enlivened by quiet anxiety. Despite finishing yesterday strongly, nearly everyone reported a disrupted night's sleep and mild symptoms of altitude sickness. The exception was Vicky, who promptly twisted her ankle on the way to the breakfast tent to complete the set of mildly unfit mountaineers.

With hindsight it should have been obvious. 1,000m is a huge altitude gain for a move of camp (though it's almost the standard for an up-and-down on a summit day), so it would be remarkable not to feel altitude symptoms after a shift like that. I also realised belatedly that the previous afternoon and night I had not drunk anything like enough water, so I started playing catch up.

Anyway, we all felt a lot better after breakfast. Flor, our chef while we were at base camp, had the knack of cooking big, tasty scotch pancakes that somehow stayed hot for long enough that you could still eat them warm [1]. I also began taking aspirin, which is supposed to think the blood and help with acclimatisation. As we shall see, I could actually have made a better and equally simple choice. George was already on half a Diamox a day, which was the source of much consternation for the guides and doctors. Diamox makes you pee even more than usual, which helps with acclimatisation, but on Aconcagua the climate is so dry [2] that it can actually be difficult to take in enough water to stay hydrated.

Suitably fed and watered, we went to the medical hut to have our stats checked. My O2 Saturation was 87, which is good for a first morning at this altitude and very good for a bloke of my size [5]. Heart rate was holding steady at 88. Letting the side down was my blood pressure, which had shot up to 150/90. Again the message was that it was right at the acceptable limit and I was advised to drink more water. The rest of the group were also passed as fit; George got a second lecture about taking Diamox (see above and repeat as necessary), Vicky got diclofenac, a crepe bandage and an ice pack, and Jeremy, who wasn't shifting the cold he had brought from England [8], was told "your lungs are green". Which we think meant green as in "red for stop, green for go" rather than "full of horrible green mucus-y stuff".

I spent the rest of the day (and the night) repeatedly draining my Camelbak, but otherwise resting up, reading and conserving strength. I was nearing the end of volume 1 of Monte Cristo (which, like the first two Lord of the Rings movies, is basically all set up for the extended payoff of Volume 2), but the battery indicator on the Sony was down to the final blob. Would I get to finish the book? We also went to visit the highest contemporary art gallery in the world, in which Miguel Douro exhibits his paintings - mainly of Aconcagua in various weathers and a style reminiscent of van Gogh. They were impressive, but I hadn't budgeted a the few hundred dollars needed to buy one [9].

I also gave some thought to what I could leave behind at base camp when we went up to the high camps. Above Mulas, the mules don't go, so you either pay for a porter or carry your own pack. George, somewhat older than the rest of us, had already booked his porters for the whole trip. The rest of us planned to do our own carrying. At the time, we were expecting to do an initial carry to Camp Canada (the first camp above base camp), leave some gear, go back to base camp and make our move up with the rest of the gear a couple of days later. A fair amount of time was devoted to working out what could go up in the first load, what in the second, and what was to stay behind.

The big debate in the group was generally about how many layers, and how many spare clothes to take. In the end, for me, it resolved itself very simply. I put on my merino baselayer, which were also doubling as pyjamas, put my walking clothes and an extra jumper on top of them, and basically stayed in that for the whole five days above base camp.

But that was several days in the future. We had two acclimatisation walks and another rest day at base camp to go, and in the meantime there was the question of going to the loo at night. The amount we were drinking required 3 or more trips per night, but the loos were a longish, rock-strewn stroll away, and it is cold at base camp whenever the sun is behind a cloud, and bloody freezing at night. What to do? I opted for putting on my down jacket and making the trek each time. Some of the others found a convenient spot nearer the tent. Judging by the dark streaks across the paths outside some of the tents, they weren't the only ones. [12]

[1] It emerged later in the trip that Flor wants to become a mountain guide and really doesn't like cooking. We didn't have the heart (or stomach) to tell her that the right strategy if you want to stop doing something is to be so bad at it that they don't let you do it any more.
[2] For context, it's only a couple of hundred miles from the Atacama Desert, widely regarded as the driest place on earth [3]
[3] Though some sources argue that the Dry Valleys of Antarctica are actually drier. So there you go. Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink. [4]
[4] Also: the boy stood on the burning deck, his feet were all in blisters. The flames came up and burned his pants, so now he wears his sister's.
[5] For any readers who don't know me, I'm 6'4" and 108kg [6] [7]
[6] Look, I'm part of that confused generation that grew up being educated in both metric and Imperial measures, and I shall mix my metrics if I please.
[7] At least, I was when I started. Not so much now. I haven't weighed myself, but since I got back I'm wearing trousers that haven't fitted properly since the late 90s
[8] It can be very hard to shift a cold at altitude. Get well before you travel, if you can.
[9] Or, perhaps more pertinently, the new house that I would need to hang it in. [10]
[10] We already have various paintings and objets d'art [11] that I have acquired sitting around in the spare room waiting for a wall with a bit of space on it
[11] Ok, ok, signed rugby shirts
[12] Of course, the obvious solution is to use a pee bottle, but it just didn't occur to us until after we'd gone up the mountain. What can I say? The brain works more slowly at altitude.

Friday, 4th January

(...sorry this one's a bit late. I was too tired to fire up the laptop and post this last night after an early morning flight)

A good final night's sleep at Confluencia, marred only by the early morning discovery that the pipes had frozen in the toilets and so the flush mechanism wasn't working. This was eventually resolved with a bucket  filled from a cask of stored water, but in the intervening period it was all a bit smelly.

I still can't get over how bright it can be at night - the moon is just past full at the moment and I didn't even need my head torch to get about at night.

We had to get up by 7am today so that our sleeping bags could be packed up and loaded onto the mule train that comes through Confluencia on the way to Plaza de Mulas at 7.15. If you're not ready by then, your stuff doesn't go with the mules. Woke up feeling very good - strong, and my stomach (which had been uncomfortable the night before) had settled down. Digestive disorders seem to be less of a problem on Aconcagua than on the trek to EBC (and, according to Jeremy, much less of a problem than on Kilimanjaro). The climate is dry, the park authorities have begun strictly regulating toilet arrangements (if you don't sign up with a provider like Grajales, you are supplied with a waste bag that must be returned full or face a hefty fine), and most places are as a result pretty clean. However, a lot of people have trouble at Confluencia because the water there has so much magnesium in it that it's cloudy white rather than clear. Lito advised us to carry extra water up from Penitentes and today he's suggested we leave camp with some of our water bottles empty and fill up at a spring he knows along the way.

Anyway, I enjoyed another good breakfast, during which we continued our ongoing debate about whether to watch the calories on the climb. The group is divided on this: Vicky on one side (guess which), everyone else on the other. Assuming 1,000 calories per hour of walking (which is pretty conservative given the steepness, the loads we'll be carrying, and the altitude), I reckon we will burn at least 60,000 additional calories over the course of the trip. It'd be very hard to eat that much, even with seconds for every meal (which is typically on offer).

We set off just after 8am and climb down a valley to cross a metal bridge over the meltwater streams. It was apparently built for the Brad Pitt movie Seven Years in Tibet which was, incongruously, largely filmed in South America. After a steepish climb up the valley wall on the other side, we pass a sign reading "Plaza de Mulas, 8 hours" and emerge onto La Playancha ("Broad Beach" - I hope I have the Spanish down right [1]). This is the flood plain of the Horcones river, a wide, flat, pebbly and sandy expanse criss-crossed by the anabranching threads of the river. Although the slope is gentle, it's tough going because a) the loose surface needs care to pick your way over it and b) it goes on, and on, and on. Conditions are sunny but windy, so as we go we are constantly adjusting our layers and zips to avoid getting too hot or too cold.

There's a difficult but spectacular final stretch where the river cuts down sharply through the sedimentary rocks of the stream bed to make a narrow gorge, at the top of which is another long, flattish plateau - the previous stream bed, now on its way to becoming a stepped terrace. Among the softer rocks are occasional balls of white rock that seems to be quartz, but the water has worked on every fissure until they look like giant grains of popcorn. At the end of the terrace is an ascent known as "brave slope" - a steep, sharply zig-zagged climb from the top of which you are in sight of Base Camp. The bottom of the slope is marked by the desiccated carcases of a number of mules who have lost their footing on the way down the slope. Although it's not obvious at the time, I'm now pretty sure that what we are climbing is the terminal moraine of the Horcones glacier - all the rocky debris that it has pushed along in front of it.

From the top of the punishing 150m ascent, we can see Base Camp, Cerro Bonete (which we will climb in a couple of days), the rocky west face of Aconcagua (not as spectacular or defined as the south face, but vast and imposing nonetheless), and El Cuerno (the Horn, a striking pyramidal peak at the head of the glacier). It's still quite a slog to Base Camp - nowhere near as steep, but over undulating ground and at this altitude you feel every upward step. Still, it only took us 7 hours to get here, not the 8 promised on the sign. Tomi and Lito declared this to be a very good time (though Lito's record for a group is less than 6).

Base Camp itself is a semi-permanent town of tents of various sizes. Each year, the guides and porters set it up anew - it's built on the glacier, and exposed to the weather, so leaving the tents in place over the winter would be a recipe for disaster. It has generators, store rooms, internet cafes and even its own art gallery. A little way off, there is an hotel, although we subsequently learn that it's closed down - rooms are much harder to heat than tents. The Grajales enclave has the usual assortment of sleeping, dining, storage and kitchen tents, plus a big geodesic dome tent that we are offered as our relaxation room - it has speakers for an iPod and beanbags for lounging on.

The camp is surrounded by penitentes - weird, spiky rows of ice pinnacles, the result of wind and dust working on ice in a cold but dry climate. Pretty much every dip in the mountain is furred with them. They're named penitentes because, apparently, they look like rows of people praying. Can't see it myself.

There's a certain amount of admin to be done at Base Camp. Jeremy and I still haven't actually paid for our permits, so we sort that out with Pablo, the base camp manager. I don't have the exact amount, and he doesn't have change, so we agree that I can have 2 minutes' credit for phone calls (at $5 per minute). I leave a message for Leah [2]. We need to check in with the doctors, too, but that can wait til we've acclimatised a bit.

Our kit has also arrived, so we can have clean clothes for once. Most of us have adopted the classic model of having a dirty "walking" set and a clean(er) "base camp" set of clothes. Gratfiyingly, I've had to set the belt on the fresh set of trousers a little tighter than it was when I set out. I sit in the dining tent for the afternoon making progress on the Count of Monte Cristo. The battery on the eReader is going down alarmingly fast, so I am not sure if I will get the chance to finish it.

[1] As fans of Eric Idle and Neil Innes will recall, all sorts of confusion can arise from bad Spanish. The Rutles' Sgt Rutter's Only Darts Club Band allegedly contained the line "I buried Stig", resulting in rumours that Stig O'Hara had died and been replaced by a ringer. The line was in fact "E burre stigano", which is very bad Spanish for "Have you a waterbuffalo?"

[2] When I get back to Mendoza, I find she's forwarded it back to me as a voicemail. It's completely unintelligible as the sound keeps pulsing on and off. Oh well, at least I tried.

Thursday, 3rd January

First night at (proper) altitude, which means a lot of getting up to go for a wee [1]. Confluencia has one public toilet and several locked private ones operated by various guiding organisations, including ours, Fernando Grajales Expeditions [5]. Whether you went public or private, it was still a chilly walk to the facilities several times a night. Chilly, but stunning: the night sky this high up and far from civilisation is startlingly clear, with the great band of the Milky Way spanning from horizon to horizon and unfamiliar Southern Hemisphere constellations sharing the sky with an incongruously upside-down Orion.

Still, if it was cold out (and we hadn't yet reached the pee bottle [6] stage), it was snug in the tent (a big semi-permanent Nissen hut affair with bunk beds in it) inside our sleeping bags. This was encouraging, because Lito had looked rather dimly on them when they were first unvieled. One of my neighbours had given me them when they traded up to better ones: Nepali-made Alpine Designs down sleeping bags. Not a brand you'll know (unless you've shopped for trekking gear in Kathmandu and resisted the temptation to go for the North Face rip-offs), but I have down mittens and hats from the same company and reckoned these would be up to the job. I'm pleased to report that they were.

However, a hut of 8 people is very noisy, and dropping off was tricky, so I started some reading. I'd brought two eReaders (figuring that the battery on at least one of them would go before we'd finished the trek) and started on the set of free out of copyright classics on my Sony Reader. I chose The Count of Monte Cristo which, it turns out, is both more complicated than the version you'll know from the films, and longer. Much longer. The Sony clocked it at 2,700 pages. I made a start, and wondered if the book would run out first, or the battery.

Breakfast was at 9.30 and was superb. One of the big problems on the Everest Base Camp trip was food. Your taste buds are dulled at altitude and it can be hard to maintain an appetite when food is reduced to little more than a texture - but you need to eat to keep your strength up. On the way to EBC, our morning omelettes became a daily challenge - could you grab one and eat it before it cooled to a piece of unpalatable rubber? Grajales pride themselves on their food, and rightly so. Hot scrambled eggs with a varying collection of cheese, herbs, bacon and sausage to add flavour, porridge, toast, pancakes and a choice of honey, jam and dulce de leche to spread on them. Plus fresh ground coffee and an endless choice of teas. Much more like it.

We then set off - at a punishing pace - on an acclimatisation walk to view the South Face of Aconcagua. It's a climb of 650m vertical from Confluencia to the viewpoint at Plaza Francia (4,000m). We reached it in around three and a half hours, slightly less than the par of 4. I have a suspicion that throughout the trek Lito was pushing us to see how fast we could go, trying to gauge how we'd cope with the summit day. The view was worth it, though. Our route eventual route up Aconcagua would be non-technical - basicallly a very long and demanding walk over scree, but little actual climbing - but the South Face is another prospect altogether. It's a vast wall of ice and rock, at 3,000m tall one of the highest and most demanding anywhere in the world, with 11 main routes, including one pioneered by Reinhold Messner and one known as Russian Roulette.

In front of it lies a huge glacier, covered with moraine and scarred with crevasses, many of which were filled with muddy, liquid meltwater.

While we were sightseeing and eating lunch we also go to watch a rockfall a few hundred metres across the valley:

The descent was almost as demanding - steep and over loose scree. On return to camp, tired but elated, we trooped off to the medical hut for the first of our acclimatisation checks. The main camps on Aconcagua are staffed with doctors who will check you over and advise you as to whether it's safe to go on. It's part of what your permit pays for - they're not cheap at $700, but there's a lot included, such as emergency helicopter evacuation. The doctors check three things - O2 Saturation and pulse (using a little clippy thing they put on your finger) and blood pressure (the traditional way, with a sphygmomanometer [8] and stethoscope). I'd been warned in advance that big guys have trouble acclimatising, so was pleasantly surprised to find that my O2 Sat was 92% and pulse was 90 - both pretty good. Blood pressure, though, was 140/80 and I was told "that's OK, but we wouldn't want it to go any higher." One to watch out for, but not a bad start to the trip. Everyone else was also OK, so we're in good shape.

And so, with a bottle of water and long johns on, to bed.

[1] It's long been known that there are several key aspects to successful acclimatisation to altitude  of which one of the most important is drinking a lot of water and its inevitable corollary, going for a pee on an embarrassingly regular basis [2] [3]. It's taken longer to understand why this is so. For instance, it didn't seem to be widely understood 5 years ago when Jeremy and I trekked to Everest Base Camp. Of course, it's all now on Wikipedia. Basically it seems to be to do with stopping the blood from becoming too alkaline. The body's normal and immediate reaction to low air pressure (and therefore low oxygen) is to breathe harder and so get more oxygen into the bloodstream, but that expels more carbon dioxide from the lungs, and leads to respiratory alkalosis (which is doctor-speak for "your blood becoming less acidic" [4]). I don't fully understand why, but this is A Bad Thing. Acclimatisation is essentially the process of your body excreting bicarbonate via the urine, to keep the blood acidic. Which it can only do if you give your body lots of water to work with and it, erm, expels it.

[2] As Dr "Dr Death" Ramesh, our expedition medic when I went to Everest Base Camp, used to say, it's all in the 3Cs: Clear, Copious and regular as Clockwork.

[3] The other acclimatisation rules, if you're interested, are (as best I can remember):
- Try to limit the height differences between where you camp from one night to the next (on Everest Base Camp this was 300m, on Aconcagua it was 500m)
- Have a rest day after each 1,000m gained
- Climb high, sleep low (i.e. where possible, go on acclimatisation walks to higher points, but return to a lower place to camp)

[4] Interestingly, people from ethnic groups we think of as high-altitude people (the Sherpas, say) have genetic mutations that predispose them towards more acidic blood.

[5] Fernando Grajales was an Argentinian farmer and mountaineer who pioneered a route up the western face of Aconcagua. In 1976, he began guiding people up Aconcagua. He was one of the first to do so, and the first to set up the logistics for carrying their gear to the various base camps. Today, the organisation is run by Fernando Grajales Jr ("Fernandito") and is one of the largest guiding organisations. They also organise logistics for independent guides, which led to us sharing our tents with an interesting mix of other guides over the course of the trip.

[6] More on this later. Much more. Probably more than you ever wanted to know [7]

[7] Which I suspect is not very much.

[8] That's an inflatable cuff to you, squire.