There are, I am almost certain, wiser things to worry about at 4,800m. Quite how it is possible to be this cold and still alive. Whether you are, in fact, still alive, because the world is quite, quite black and howling; perhaps edema had after all set in and this was indeed it, this was the afterlife, albeit a rather pleasant one with the tang of high snow in the background. Wiser things to ponder, too: was yesterday the one full of the most fabulous and eye-twisting vistas I had ever seen, or was that the day before, they all tend to morph into one; and how on earth can the bright-eyed Chileans even think of playing soccer at this height, the white lines on their pitches of lava dust marked out in dirty blond sulfur scraped from the volcano burbling away so happily nearby, when I can hardly plant one foot in front of the other?
But no, I, in my wisdom, was struggling to have a cigarette. Gasping for it. Here's a little-known fact, possibly because precious few fools have tried to light up at this altitude: cigarettes don't work at 4,800m. There is, baldly, not enough oxygen in the atmosphere to allow them to burn: instead the paper will huff and crinkle but sturdily refuse to catch, and you will be invited back into the warmth of the growling minibus with pitying glances and muttered Chilean versions of idiot.
Well, I'm sorry, but still. I was higher than I had ever been in my entire life, higher than most people ever manage, well above half the height of Everest, past the point grizzled non-smoking climbers mark as very high altitude, and I wanted to celebrate, as I wanted to celebrate surviving the 100 or so hairpin curves that had led us up there, and give tearful thanks for our driver's keen brown eyes and happy genius with gears, and celebrate the monstrous beauty of this part of the world. And I count myself retrospectively justified in my clever little scientific test, and, I suppose I also count myself lucky. Lucky, in every sense, to have been there at all.
The high Andes between Chile and Argentina, around the Tropic of Capricorn, are astonishing, impossible and pretty much impassable, until very recently when travel company Explora began running travesias, journeys in sturdy buses with many acclimatizing walks along the way, from San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, up and over the range, to Salta in Argentina. To date, a measly handful of travelers has managed the trip - if you discount the generations of Incas who must have managed it rather a lot, given that the route follows the actual Inca Trail (and managed it, moreover, without wheels, which history tells us they discovered but then forgot on the grounds of uselessness for covering the terrain: they might as well have invented the Lilo or pogo stick). Anyway, discount them I happily did, because that was all a long time ago, oh, hundreds of years, and the hills were probably much lower then; I was one of the happy few to have survived it in the modern age.
"Survive" gives the wrong impression. It was bliss; there was bliss every day. But survival is, starkly, an undeniable part of it, simply because of the altitude. You can't go straight up there: fly from sea level then drive high in the one day. It's not just that blood would start pouring from your ears and then your head would explode. It's that, long before, you would be functionally incapable of most actions other than sitting crying in a corner, rasping for air; your body needs time to reprocess its preponderance of red blood cells to grasp maximum value from the available oxygen. To this end, we spent four happy days acclimatizing in Chile, in the Explora base in San Pedro, thinking we were simply having fun while our bodies were actually getting on with some serious stuff.
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