later on. Nowhere was this more evident than at the Los Cuernos refugio. We’d had a look around the campsite and again it wasn’t very good, and we’d seen the sign saying that Camping Italiano, the next free campsite, was just less than two hours away, so we decided to go for it.

The map suggested that it was only about 4 km, with a climb of around 300 meters. Whilst this was true, the first thing that the trail did was to descend right down to the lake shore!! All very scenic, but what goes down must go up!! After about an hour and a half we were faced with the most hardcore steep climb which quite frankly nearly saw us off!! It took us around half an hour to drag ourselves up there, and promptly collapse at the top!! At that point we figured that that must be it - we were expecting the campsite to be just around the corner - no such luck!! We asked someone coming the other way how far

it was, and they replied “Oh, about forty minutes!!”. We nearly died on the spot!! It wasn’t particularly hard going, but we really were absolutely out of energy, and that forty minutes was one of the hardest of the whole five days!! With some difficulty we got our tent pitched and tucked into some soup and instant mashed spuds with cheese!! Amazing how good anything tastes when you’re so hungry!! On the plus side, once we’d rested and eaten we were able to appreciate what a fantastic location this campsite was in - at the bottom of a beautiful valley next to a raging river. On one side were the Cuernos, on the other snow-capped Paine Grande, the highest mountain in the park with the French glacier looming above us on the side of it!!

The next morning we awoke to absolutely beautiful weather - the sky was blue, the sun was shining and the previous days exertion had meant that we’d