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."