Up the mountains

The base camp for Aconagua is 90 miles from here so I thought I would do what all intrepid outdoor types do and get the bus to it. After all I´d never seen a 7000 metre mountain before (The pedants can stop right there, I know its just shy of the 7000 mark).

Fortunately the sky was cloudless, though the first 40 minutes of the journey were pretty uneventful, unless you have a vineyard fetish, then a sharp right, a change of roads, and there is the first sight of the big beast. It is enormous, trouble is you have no real sense of how big it is as there are other brutes stretching out on either side of it as far as the eye can see; some of them obviously volcanoes, all of them covered in snow. This new road was also plumb straight. After a half hour the high peaks dissapeared: obscured by the foothills.

Then the climb started, this wasn´t one of those alpine climbs where the road switched back on itself time after time. This road followed the river Mendoza and only bent when the river did. The bus went on and on, the gradients got steeper and steeper, the river carving canyons out of the mountainsides, which were striped horizontally by yellows, reds and blues and intermittently with vertical bands of black and green.  Every so often the climb would reach a valley where the river would split and form delta like strands over the gravel bed then it would coalesce and strike out to carve new canyons. Relentlesslythe climb continued, the bus overtaking lorries that were wheezing, coughing and belching out black smoke with the exertions of the climb. The montains towering higher and higher with every mile.

After four hours of this the bus came to a halt in a place called Puente del Inca, which is a multi coloured tunnel carved in the rock by the river, the colours formed by the various ores contained in it. Unfortunately for me the entrance to the base camp was another hours walk and four hundred foot higher, so off I went. At this point I was about 9000 foot high, the wind was howling, the sun was opressive and it was getting colder all this combined to make a short walk tougher than it should´ve been. Then finally base camp and through another canyon a closer view of the highest mountain outside of the Himalayas.

Now I had a sense of perspective, Anacongua atill seemed huge, the snow line was still thousands of feet higher and the moutain seemed totally covered in the stuff. There are a few guide books that say all you need to climb this mountain is an experienced guide, proper equipment and a good level of fitmess. To my mind that would be madness: God alone knows what the conditions are like up there. It was getting bad enough where I was. Attempt to climb 22,000 feet to get planted six foot under? No thanks.

Anyway after a few hours wandering about it was time to return to Mendoza. After the journey to the base camp the descent was an anti climax. Back at my digs I was greeted by the Teutonic temptresses who told me they went horse riding and that they were sore because of it and wouldn´t be able to walk properly for days. After a brief enquiry about my day they went on to ask me what I did for a living, so I gave then the old semi retirement spiel, which was met by the blondest of the teutons with the response: " You are really lucky, your about the same age as my dad, and he will not be able to retire for years". Back to Earth with a thump.