Thursday 8th January dawned : I had already bought my ticket for the one o’clock bus from Santiago to Puente del Inca, and set about doing the last minute purchases.  After contemplating the possible effects of high altitude on my long serving Optimus 123 petrol stove, I decided to buy two litres of normal unleaded car petrol / gasoline – white petrol is safer, and easily available in Chile but seemed to be less volatile.  I spent much of the rest of the morning attempting to get everything into, or tied to, my rucksack.  It had been obvious that a sizeable overflow bag would be needed, and in the end a fifteen litre day sack, strapped to the top, was just enough to contain the excess.  The main culprits were not the sixteen days of food so much as the down jacket and the plastic boots, which together occupied well over half of the main compartment. The weight was over thirty kilograms even before I’d filled up with fuel and water – I estimated that I would be starting the walk from Puente del Inca carrying thirty five kilograms.

There was no question of being allowed onto the Santiago metro with such a huge backpack, so I invested in a taxi to get to the bus station.  On the way I stopped by the photo lab to pick up some prints of the slide that I had taken of Aconcagua from the plane, when I was flying from Mendoza to Santiago the previous year.  As a result I almost missed the bus, and got to the terminal with barely two minutes to spare.  I had been a little peeved that I’d had to buy a ticket all the way to Mendoza even though I was going half the distance.  Never the less, it was only $20, so it didn’t exactly break the bank.  An hour into the trip I remembered what I had forgotten : candles.  Luckily the bus stopped at a little general store – the last before the long climb to the Los Libertadores pass and the Argentine frontier. 

There were only half a dozen people on the bus, so the Chilean passport control was very quick.  Then it was through the tunnel, and down the ten-kilometre stretch towards the new Argentine checkpoint, a large and weird-looking building with an enormous curved roof.  A kilometre before this is the track leading off up the Los Horcones valley, and the entry point to the Aconcagua Provincial Park where I was planning to embark on my adventure the following morning.  There is a fleeting glimpse of Aconcagua from the road at this point : a woman near the front of the bus was tremendously excited, and tried to take a photo of it through the window of the moving vehicle.  I was a little reluctant to look, for some reason.  Perhaps I was scared that Aconcagua wouldn’t be there any more, or that I’d take one look at it and decide to carry on to Mendoza instead…