To anybody that has only stayed in a house or hotel, camping would perhaps come as a shock. Sure if you have a car and only have to lug your stuff as much distance as the width of your tent then camping could be very comfortable. You can buy tent heaters, sinks, toilets and stretcher beds similar to the luxury safari camps in glossy brochures for Africa. If you have to carry everything you need for five days then you go into the minimalist realms of real camping. This type of camping would then become a shock to the normal campers. I am not saying we are hardcore, we can afford the luxury of a sleeping bag and mat - in Vanuatu we didn't even have that. You could take the minimalist theme even further, take away the tent and you go into survival camping. I am sure that climbers that take weeks climbing some very big vertical rock faces would sneer at that luxury - they have to sleep hanging off vertical faces in sub zero temperatures.

So all this brings me to last night, our mattress was 5mm of foam that gave you that intemate connection with earth. More specifically it's the lumps such as hips that make contact leaving other parts in the air. All that pressure in one spot makes it go numb, we repeatedly woke up to turn over and get the feeling in our hips. You can get comfortable as long as you change the way you sleep, keeping as much contact with the matress evens out the pressure but when you are sleeping you go back to your old proper matress ways.

Thanks to our sleeping bags that are claimed to keep you comfortable to -15 we weren't cold. And thanks to our ear plugs weren't that aware of the wind driving rain and gravel onto our tents. I was only aware that this happened as Liz heared all this through the earplugs. We both however heared some noisey b***** in an adjacent tent but that didn't go on late.

We didn't get up early, the sleeping bag is warm and outside was Baltic. When we did poke our heads out it seemed the late arrivals were the first to go. A large dome tent about 15ft circular was still there (surely this much be an Israely tent). The iceburgs from yesterday had melten but replaced with new ones, the sky however still looked grim.

During our breakfast (dry cerial), some blue gaps appeared in the sky. Liz managed to have a hot shower but by the time I got there it was stone cold far too cold to have a shower. Liz in autopilot finished off packing things back into our rucksacks before doing anything else. I pursueded her to go along the shore to get a view of the glacier. On the way we spotted an iceburg close enough to the shore to grab. That failed but I did get a chunk to have a look at. You would think ice is ice but the chunk in my hands had a honeycomb pattern and was completely flawless, no bubbles or stress fractures (it was quite beautiful).

Liz was going blue so we decided to head back the way we came. A short distance further on a sign saying mirador (view) made us hesitate, we had come all this way without seeing the glacier close up. We hid our bags in the woods and headed in the direction.

The glacier was close and for a change was occasionally in sun shine. Lots of iceburgs trapped in a bay gave a nice foreground to the pictures.

The journey going back was a lot nicer, the weather was better and we weren't finding it as hard going. We had a very strong tail wind that almost blew you up the hills. We saw yet more Condors, they are no longer a special thing but I have the camera handy if they come close.

After 4 or 5 hours we went over a rise to see the brilliant turquoise of the lake we started from. It was even more blue than yesterday - very striking in the sunlight.

As soon as I got to the camping area I dropped the backs and ran up a small hill to get a picture of the lake with the mountains behind - it was beautiful.

We really enjoyed the walk today. The concequence was the massive drain on the camera batteries. I needed to find somewhere I could charge them. The initial look around didn't find anywhere suitable. I put this issue to one side to tackle another - how to cook dinner. There was a hut that was called a kitchen, it had two camp cookers and one sink for over a hundred campers. Most people were in there with their own camping stoves making use of the wind free and consequently warm environment. It was heaving the only place you could stand was by the free camp stoves that we ended up using. Our vegy pasta and tomato sauce to our horror contained meat - you simply cannot buy anything without meat. To make matters worse we had three packets of this as part of our five day rations.

Going back to the charging camera battery problem - there was no where that had working sockets that campers were allowed into - sod it I will try to just walk into the no access areas.

No problems getting in and we found one working socket, right by a leather armchair and wood burner. We payed the ridiculous $4 dollar each for a beer to merge in and waited whilst the batteries charged.

Once this was done we headed out into the very strong ice cold wind and the warmth of our sleeping bags.