Tonight we are in Lima, Peru's coastal capital city. It's freezing, with a bitter wind coming off the Pacific, but it's going to get worse. Tomorrow we go to Cusco at 3,400m to acclimatise and from there we're heading up into the really high Andean communities of Cuatro Lagunas and the remote valleys of Espinar at over 4,000m.
Peru is going through its coldest winter in 50 years and hundreds of people and thousands of animals have already died of hypothermia as temperatures have fallen to record -23C lows in the mountain villages. But while this year's cold has been put down to a periodic La Niña phenomenom, scientists here are convinced the bigger picture in the Andes is of progressive climate change.
Retreating glaciers, wild fluctuations of temperatures, unseasonal weather patterns, unpredictable frosts and extreme weather events are all consistent with climate change models.
The idea of this 10-day journalistic expedition – I'm travelling with people from Oxfam, and writers from Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador and elsewhere – is to see on the ground how changing weather is affecting human development in the Andes.
So, from the glaciers we plan to drop down through the many climatic zones all the way to the humid Yasuni national park in the Ecuadorean Amazon rainforest, where vast quantities of oil have been found. Along the way we hope to meet scientists, community leaders, farmers and others who will share their experiences and observations.
We want to know what's happening to water supplies, crops and glaciers. Are the changes in climate pushing people to the cities? Is health affected? Are communities learning to adapt? How far do the scientific models play out in real life?
It may not be strictly scientific, but anthropological observation like this is invaluable because in the end, people's interpretation of the events they see around them count as much or more than as any peer-reviewed paper.
I'll be reporting in this post on what we find as we go along. I suspect that transmitting the information back to base will be as much of a problem as the cold.