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)