The last morning at Mulas, now at last the real climbing begins. No doctors, no access to running water etc. Off we go to spend the first night at Camp Canada. Mattias feels fine but his oxygen level lies on 78 %, just below the recommended 80 %. The doctor asks us about our plans and make a judgement that it is OK for us to go on with our trip since we will stay two nights at Camp Canada.

Here we have walked for almost an hour away from Plaza de Mulas which you can see in the background of the picture. This type of walking is very monotonous and exhausting; you walk along with almost exactly 30 steps in a minute, that is 2 seconds between every half metre step. The only variation is when you change direction every fifth minute when the serpentine path takes a turn... Here it is Marco's turn to take the hardest position, to walk at the very front and to keep the right speed to the rest. To put everything into perspective it can be mentioned that we are soon at the same altitude as the summit of Mont Blanc (4810 masl).

At Conway Rocks (4610 masl) we take a shorter break. A couple of minutes here with a wonderful view and nice weather motivate us to struggle on.

Tired after this days walk we spend some time relaxing and chatting with the other expeditions at Camp Canada. The tent were set up and we put on our jackets to stay warm. As you can see the space is rather limited in this proportionately small base camp. Luckily no one had moved our provisions that we had carried up the previous days and we had two fairly flat and good camping grounds.

Time for food again, there is some lack of appetite but you must have the discipline to eat to stay healthy and acclimatize to the altitude. As we have told you earlier there is little snow on the mountain this year so the snow we need to melt we have to walk quite far to fetch. The casserole with chicken has one disadvantage compared with the casserole with pod and that is that we have to sacrifice water to do the washing-up. In order not to miss the fluid in the dishwater (without washing-up detergent!) we also drink that water. Not tasteful but necessary.

After we have fixed snow to get water and ate some food we had time to relax and enjoy the sun. In the background we can see parts of the Norwegian group that Mattias met two days earlier. They stand and witness a drama about 200 metres below the camp, a person had collapsed by exhaustion on the way down from the summit and is now receiving help from another group and a guard at the park who has run really fast down from Nido de Condores to assist.

Robert switch on our emergency radio and we could then follow the communication between the rescue team and Plaza de Mulas. With the help of Olof's translation we found out that everything went well and that everyone came down safe.

Here Robert stands all dressed up in the thickest baselayer by Ullfrotte (wool terry) ready to crawl into the tent. A garment you really need and want to have when the sun sets at the horizon. When evening comes our duties are to melt more snow for the continuing trip tomorrow. Robert and Marco end the evening by playing cards in the tent while Mattias and Olof sit and chat about tents and other equipment with Erik who has his tent next to us.