Acclimatisation hike to Plaza Francia – at the base of Aconcagua

Tuesday 10/01/23

‘When you have services it’s an expedition tourism, when you have to do everything by yourself we do it’s a real expedition’ @rbarcena2020 

The tent in the morning was covered in frozen droplets of last night’s rain. The air was fresh and crispy, I could feel it in my lungs. I slept ok-ish, of course with every change of the position I would wake up and my watch hasn’t registered any sleep data, I removed this function completely as well as the body battery, as I don’t want it to mess with my mind.  For breakfast we had some porridge with dry bananas and I added some chocolate powder to it. Quick coffee and we are ready for our day. 

We were surrendered by beautiful peaks firstly in many different colours of green, yellow, and rusty reddish, almost reminiscent of a mini-7-coloured mountain in Peru. We kept walking, and suddenly bare mountaintops were replaced with snowy peaks staring at as from all sides.

We took it easy, we talked, had many breaks … eventually we made it to the photo spot just an hour before the Plaza Francia, where we had a clear view of Aconcagua south wall with its vertical 3000 m. Two avalanches went down the south wall while we were having our lunch. Apparently, there were breve as well as crazy enough people to take a challenge to climb from the south wall. Which is apparently very dangerous. The south wall approach is permanently closed and there is no camping permitted anywhere in the Plaza Francia area. 

We had lunch in the beautiful surroundings, and when people started showing up we packed our stuff and slowly made our way back to the Confluencia Camp. 

We were welcomed by a bit of an angry lady from Lanko mountain services, we are using their mules to transport our equipment up to Plaza de Mulas. They already made it difficult for us as in Mendoza we arranged two mules, as we have been carried a lot of things ourselves, but in Penitentes where we dropped our bags for mules they told us that we will have to hire additional mule, and after negotiations they dropped the price to $170.

Anyway, yesterday we were told that we can use their big tent, so we left our big bag with food and cooking facilities in there. We also cooked our dinner and breakfast there, but we haven’t been told to remove it today as the guests with ‘all inclusive’ services will need it.  It’s fine we just took the bag and put it in the tent and we cooked our meal there. It was more about the way the information was passed over. But it is what it is. A lot of people arrived today in the camp. It’s noisy, you can hear many different languages. 

Weather is a bit crazy, sun, rain, hail, sun again, and rain. 

Today we also had a visit to the medic, who checked our pulse, saturation levels, and listened to our lungs. We are all good, we just need to drink more water. 

Raul decided that we are gonna go to the Plaza de Mulas tomorrow, as the day after tomorrow a lot of people will be heading that way; and we want to avoid it. There is still a risk of bad weather but we are planning to leave early. Probably 7 am. Getting up at 5.20. Just to pack, have breakfast, and we will have to put the tents away, and prepare our equipment which the mule will take. 

Tomorrow will be a long day, it’s around 8-9 h trek, Raul thinks we will make it faster but let’s see. 

Now it’s time to relax and prepare for sleep.