So today we got up before the sun and caught the 7am bus to the visitor centre at Honcones. It’s about a 4 hour bus journey and to be honest I slept most of it, although when I was awake and looking out the window the views were amazing.

Aconcagua is the highest mountain outside Asia, at 6,960.80m (22,837 ft), and the highest point in the Southern Hemisphere. We obviously were not climbing to the top of this mountain as that takes around 20 days but we decided to hike to base camp, Confluencia, which is around 8.5km each way.

These are some of the views on the way up. The trek wasn’t too hard in terms of steep inclines but it was a steady climb upwards. However the altitude made it more difficult.

It took us around two and a half hours to get to the base camp which was at 3,400m. We then climbed up a small hill by the side of the base camp and the views were unbelievable.

These photos don’t really show the colours of the mountains – they were like rainbows, it was amazing. It was pretty windy at this point too but we found a sheltered spot and ate some lunch.

The trek back down was slightly easier but we had to keep stopping to take photos as the scenery was breathtaking.

As we got closer to the end we walked around Laguna Honcones and the colour of the water was a lovely turquoise colour.

The bus back to Mendoza was at 430pm and the one after that at 8pm. As we got towards the end we realised we only had a couple of minutes left to cat h the 430pm bus so we had to jog the last bit. Anna ran ahead to let the park rangers at the visitor centre know we had made it back ok. We literally just made it in time.

On the way home we caught a glimpse of the famous sulphur bridge at Puenta del Inca.

We were all pretty tired when we got back to the hostel so we ate in and shared a bottle of wine.

These last few days with Petra and Anna have been great, hopefully we’ll stay in touch.