After barely a wink of sleep and waking up to freezing conditions I had a sudden thought that I hadn't seen my headlamp since arriving. I turned our room upside down and had everyone look but there was no sign of it. When we had arrived yesterday the guide had rushed in and grabbed all our boots (where I had stashed my borrowed headlamp) and setup them up with ice cramp-ons. I continued to look for the headlamp for the next two days and unfortunately it never turned up, my worst fear being that I might have to attempt the final climb without a light. Breakfast was served around 8:30am and once again not bad; a bowl of chopped fruits, various cereals, breads and a couple of fried eggs. We have a 3-4 hour hike infront of us today and not only is it freezing cold outside it is both raining and snowing. I am really starting to think this whole thing was a bad idea but I am here now and I will just have to make the most of it. The rest of the morning we had free-time as we wouldn't start the hike up to the refuge at 5300m until 12:30. Another big lunch was brought out at 11am but none of us could eat it as we had all just eaten huge breakfasts. The guides brought out little snack packs for today and tomorrow's hike which was another nice suprise. We packed all our stuff in our giant backpacks and those of us who had wet weather gear put it on as it was raining and snowing heavenly outside. At 12:30pm we set off into the bitterly cold and windy conditions, unfortunately visibility was bad for the first half of the trek and so I just kept my eyes on my feet and the path. Every half an hour or so we would stop and drink water, add or take layers and eat snacks. The first part of the walk was over a Stoney outcrops and with only slight inclines and gradients so it wasn't too hard. Arriving at the halfway point of today's climb we paid a little old lady a small fee to enter the mountain and then made our way up a steep rocky, wet and snow covered trek. This is the point where it started to get a little dangerous and walking in the snow patches proved incredibly difficult in standard hiking shoes. The wind snow and rain continued for another hour until we made it to the start of the base camps. We passed a lady of about 70 who was obviously going to also attempt the summit and it have everyone a comforting thought; if she could do it them surely 6 young and fit men could aswell. Our guides were Bolivian and quite funny but you could see they weren't overly worried about us or our safety and couldn't really be bothered teaching us correct technique which was a real disappointment as the reason I had paid top dollar and chosen this company was because they had been highly recommended. Reaching the first snow covered mountain we had to put on our snow boats - at this point another guide joined our group and started hassling me about the lost headlamp saying I needed to pay money for it right now. It was really annoying and kind of ruined the trip a bit for me because from this point on the guides constantly hassled me asking for money; at this point it clicked that it was a scam and the original guide had in fact taken the lamp and was trying to get money out of me (something I saw throughout the trek with other customers aswell). The worst thing was they were threatening not to lend me a spare lamp and then I wouldn't be able to hike tomorrow when we set off at 1:30am. This last part of the hike up to our refuge was incredible difficult, tiresome and to be honest dangerous - none of us had experience walking in snow and it proved a real challenge. Arriving at our refuge we all felt a sense of relief - unfortunately the refuge was this tiny square hut about 3m by 4m with a tiny room attached for the cooking, no electricity and definitely no heating and the toilet was a box outside with a garbage bag attached - so I would be holding if the urge to use the toilet came about. There were 9 thin mattresses and a roof made of old scrap tin with wholes everywhere. To go with all that we were told 6 other hikers would be joining us tonight so we would be crammed on to the 9 beds and with all our gear also crammed in the room there was barely any room to move. Dinner came out at 5:30pm and I guess it wasn't too bad another vegetable soup with a boiled sausage and lots of hot water for tea. The aim was to go to bed at 6pm as we would be up at 12:30am to start our hike. Being a bit smarter tonight I put all my clothes on and even left the inners to my boots on and climbed into my sleeping bag - the temperature dropped to about -10 but amazingly I was able to maintain some body heat. The other 6 climbers (Bolivians) arrived late when we were all in bed and started banging and crashing things which was a bit annoying as we were all desperately trying to sleep, that along with the fact half the group were sick - spewing, coughing and running to the makeshift toilet made it very hard to sleep. In the end I was the only one that managed any sleep and at 10:30pm the other groups alarm clocks went off and they started to prepare for their hike which meant headlamps flashing everywhere, banging crashing, eating breakfast and talking incredibly loudly. After the 10:30pm wake-up no one in our group was able to go back to sleep so it looked like we would all be attempting the hike with little to no sleep.