Start point: Camp 1 (5,000m)
End point: Camp 2 (5,500m)

As I was reading out yesterday’s blog to the group last night, a guide from the other team wandered up. Our guides had told him that I was a priest and that I would be saying mass. As he wandered up, I was just finishing a section on pooping and was moving to crampons and bribery when my entire team said “Amen” and blessed themselves. The poor man’s eyes opened wide before he also hastily blessed himself and cast down to listen to the rest of Father Dermot’s sermon.

I started today off very pleasantly with the offer of another bribe. I was asked by a team mate with a very sunburnt nose not to mention that after spending ten minutes rubbing sunblock into his nose and wondering why the more sunblock he applied, the more his nose burned, he realised that he was actually rubbing large amounts of alcohol hand sanitiser into his nose. As his hand sanitiser exploded in his pants pocket a few days ago, he should really have recognised the burning sensation.

We all need to be very careful with sunblock, even though it can feel cold, up this high the sun can burn you very easily. Horselady keeps repeating the question “Have you creamed yourself?”, and then starts giggling. It’s a long story that involves a German roommate, a South African vet and occasionally a helicopter. If you don’t get the joke, I won’t explain it.

It was very cold climbing up to Camp 2 and a difficult day for all of us:

The pants of one of the Clare lads had split, leaving him to resort to his backup pants, a shiny royal blue pair with gold trim. Another of the lads complained that these blue pants were too garish and reminiscient of a marching brass band’s uniform. I offered to patch up the crotch of the old pants with duct tape, but my offer was declined. So now we have Bruno out in front twirling his baton and one lad wearing half the appropriate marching uniform behind.

The doctor’s Kindle froze during the climb today. Extreme cold often causes batteries to lose their charge so all electronics are kept in our sleeping bags at night. Doc had been reading an account of an amateur climber who’d kept a daily record of his trip up Aconcagua and tried to squeeze little jokes and anecdotes into each day’s chapter. What a ridiculous idea. Luckily a coalition of the willing had volunteered to carry the Grocer’s solar charger up from basecamp so Doc’s Kindle could be … rekindled. (Sorry)

Camp 2 is one of the nicer camps. We’re at the base of a wide frozen river – it’s not quite large enough to qualify as a glacier but is just as beautiful. Once the sun gets hot enough you can fill your water bottles up straight from the melting ice, but it freezes again very quickly once the sun goes down. When we arrived in mid afternoon, we had to cross a wide and  noisy fast flowing stream, but going to sleep it has entirely stopped moving. All around the river are large boulders sitting on top of much thinner pillars of ice, which have been eroded away by the wind and water. They look like they could fall down at any moment.

There was a bit of worry when the Expedition leader’s crampons went missing. In a terrible case of unfair profiling, the Clare lads were initially considered persons of interest to the investigation. Their bags had been repacked so many times, anything could have found its way in there. Luckily their names were cleared when the crampons turned up in the tent of a member of the other team.

We’re staying in very small two-man tents, but this evening four fully grown men squeezed into one tent for a particularly harrowing game of draughts. Non-experts (like myself) were told in no uncertain terms that our presence was not welcome, even as spectators. We were relegated to standing outside in the wind listening to a cacophony of yelps, threats and curses in Clare, Tipperary and Argentinian accents. If I’ve done one thing right this whole expedition, it’s bringing along that feckin draughts board. I’ve only played one game myself, but it certainly keeps the others occupied.