We got up early to catch the bus to the Torres del Paine national park. If you remember it was this park we were prevented on getting to due to the general strike.

Nothing eventful on the bus journey, loads of Reas and the same bleak landscape that you always see between the highlights. The scenery once we caught the boat got pretty good but the weather was normal - grey and horrible.

Our bags were loaded with everything we need over the next five days. Food, tent, sleeping bags, cooking equipment and most importantly alcohol. As we were in Chile I thought I would take a bottle of Pisco, one it is cheap and potency to weight ratio was excellent. Weight of course is a key factor, despite being very stingy in what we brought the bags were heaving and heavy. We had to lug this for many hours each day through the mountains. Our bags looked small compared with most people that had the tell tail foam mats pined to the outside to indicate they were camping.

We were dropped off on the west side of the park, near a refugio and camping area called Paine Grande. The weather here was a lot better, campers were lolling around next to their tents enjoying the mountain scenery and turquoise coloured lake setting. I felt I would like to join them but we only had enough food for five days and needed to keep moving.

We walked up a path alongside Lago Grey heading to a camping area by the glacier. This was a 3.5 hour walk, though the Chilians and Argentinians are pretty fit so add a couple of hours on for actual time.

The mountains are a lot different here to most places I have been. They have two composite types of rock: granite and sedimentary. The highly erroded and dark sedimentary rock sits like a cap on the smooth light coloured granite. The other interesting aspect is that the upper sections of these mountains are well within the snowline but have no snow on any exposed surfaces. This is not surprising when you consider the strong winds here but the interesting feature is that the dark rock is painted white by what appears to be ice. You can see all the normal jagged rock details making the mountains captivating to look at.

We puzzled over this until the steady uphill path and heavy bags gave us something else to think about. This leg we have to backtrack on, so in theory we could have stayed at the campsite we past leaving our stuff there and speeded up to the glacier and back during the day. I didn't have a good reason not to do this apart from camping next to a glacier - we carried on as planned.

We were almost dying as we approached the high point and the first view of the glacier. This was in theory an easy distance and asent but we had all five days food weighing us down. Once you start going down any going up comes as a shock especially on the legs. We started to dream of tents and the end, eventually Liz looked happy - she could see some people building. We thought we were there and even took a celebratory picture. In fact this was the new camping area an unknown distance to where we could stay. It turned out to be only 10 minutes further on but had a small risk of going down the wrong path. We passed a couple of very knackered people who asked us if this was the right way, any backtracking at this stange could send people over the edge.

We took the correct route, tents were scattered on the gravelly ground near to the shoreline. There was little chance of a swim, you didn't need to see the iceburgs in the lake to know that it was going to be Baltic. We payed our money and started to look for a place to camp, there was lots of space near to the lake but the people already here chose sheltered areas furthest away - the Patagonian wind is fierce and cold.

We chose a spot close to the lake but behind a windbreak made from rocks. We pegged the tent down and put large rocks over these to be sure. We had already seen one tent go flying. Cooking was easy, I had made some stew that only needed heating. Just as well we got into our sleeping bags to keep warm and fell asleep. We woke briefly to put in our earplugs, the wind and neighbours make a right old din.