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."