28th May 2005 What a day! I think I died and went to hell and back again! Having been up all night not being to well, I think mainly due to worrying about today, we headed off at around 6am. The climb was unbelieveably hard but I was so proud of myself! We headed through the cloud forrest which is a mini rain forest, kept seeing spiders webs but no spiders thank heavens, although I think I saw more of the ground! For the first half of the day I bought up the rear and then Ben unfortunately suffered with a little altitude sickness so he ended up being last, but as we said we made it in the end, all be it a several hours behind the rest of the group! I caught Liz up going up the ascent to Dead Womans Pass and we just took a few steps and stopped, took a few steps and stopped, the air was very thin. The days ascent was a vertical 1200m, going through the cloud forrest I lost my Oakley sun glasses which I was NOT going to go back down to search for! And a group of Japanese/Chinese pensioners in there 70's/90's over took me at one stage, I thoguht I was imagining it! We reached Dead Womans Pass late afternoon, and the views were just stunning, although I found it a little odd with the sun beating down and being wrapped up in a fleese and wooly hat! We then headed down to the second camp site, which I have to say was probably tougher than going up, its a killer on the knees, I have no idea what the Inca's were thinking when they built the steps! We reached camp at around 5pm, we had dinner soon thereafter and then went straight to sleep, I slept like a baby. We were shown the next days trail which you could see from the camp site, you guessed it, whats goes down must go back up...........myself and Liz didn't look impressed, but there was no turning back!!! Not that I would have!? We had aranged to get up earlier than the rest of the group as we were so far behind, but then everyone else wanted to leave earlier...........kind of defeated the odject!