It was a very early start to the day, we even had to miss our breakfast for the agreed 6am pickup. As it turned out, it was a bit late because the taxi driver had to change a tyre. It was a shared ride with Carlee and Andy, and for a total of s/150 we were driven to the track start and the driver would wait as long as needed before driving us back - a bargain.

The 1,5 hour drive up to the track start was a crazy journey in itself, our driver took his bog standard station wagon car from sealed roads in the city and then onto a windy dirt road. As we climbed and bounced higher into the mountain we suddenly turned left into an impossibly bad track. The track would have been a challenge for a 4WD truck, never mind a normal car. It could be best described as a dried up river bed, it was just a bed of uneven rocks on a narrow track carved into the steep mountainside.(We found out later the road was built 30 years ago when the lake's dam was built and never maintained since).

It was still cold when we arrived at the start of the track, the sun hadn't risen over the 5,000m ridge on the eastern side of the lake. It wasn't going to be too hard of a walk today, once we climbed the 50m up to the lake which sat at 4,474m, it was just a walk round the glacier lake's edge.

At the ranger hut, we checked what wildlife we might see and even though wildcats would be awesome, we decided that chinchillas were more likely. David spotted one on the rocks, in the distance, but before everyone managed to see it, it was off.

The color of the water in the lake was really unusual, a kind of greeny colour which I guess was due to being melted glacier water. At the end of the lake, we walked onto the finest white sand imaginable. At the far end of the sand was the glacier although it looked like a rock. Looking closely at the bottom, you could see it gently dripping into the water pool in front of it. Just to be sure though, David decided to clamber over the rocks at the edge of the pool to touch and stand on the glacier. It was cold to the touch but very rough with lots of little rocks and dust frozen to the surface.

We had some lunch listening to the ice creak and the occasional rock fall down from above. The glacier seemed to be creeping down a bowl on the mountains with the peak, Ranrapalca at 6,100m, towering above.

We walked back the same way, it only took an hour and we had plenty of photo stops. Just before we reached the dam at the end, David spotted another chinchilla in the rocks. It was much closer and stayed put whilst everyone walked back to get a good look at it - they kind of look like a Davy Crockett hat, a ball of fur with a bushy tail. At the dam, we stopped to admire the landscape we had just walked through. From a distance, it was easier to see the glacier and it's path down the mountainside.

We paid the park entrance fee, s/10 each, as we left and found our driver helping another driver with his engine. The help was reciprocated when our car wouldn't start and we got a push down the hill. The engine started straight away and we bounced our way back down the mountain towards Huaraz.

Back in town, we went to California Cafe for coffee and cookies. It was a typical backpacker hangout with sofas, book exchange, board games, WiFi and excellent coffee.

Afterwards we bought our bus tickets to Lima for Monday night, did some snack shopping and then retreated to our roof terrace for a cold beer while the sun set behind the Cordillera Negra.