a look at the Grey Glacier!!

Once again it was a day without our packs, and in fact we wouldn’t have to carry them any great distance again - Hurray!! Lago Grey is very aptly named, being the distinctive slate grey colour which some glacial lakes are, and complete with the inevitable small icebergs. The walk up to the refugio involves climbing for a couple of hours to the glacier viewpoint, and then descending all the way back to lake level for a look at the glacier from below. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a great fan of glaciers, but we have seen a fair few in the past month or so, and between us we decided that the viewpoint would do us very nicely - it wasn’t really worth the extra down and up just to see it up close!! So we decided that we’d sit and have lunch and gaze upon what was a pretty impressive glacier actually - very wide with an island of rock in the middle, and another

pretty white one as well. There was some low cloud, but you could just about see up into the beginnings of the ice field, and I for one was looking forward to flying over this area when we took our flight to Santiago. It would of course depend on the weather playing ball - something which is by no means a certainty in these parts!!

After a while we headed back down the valley to pack up our tent for the last time and catch the catamaran across the lake to the waiting connecting buses to take us back to Puerto Natales where a nice warm room with a nice big bed awaited us at Alejandro’s!! There were great views from the catamaran and it was really nice being able to see all the valleys which we’d slogged our way up from further away!! Our sense of achievement was quite considerable I can tell you!! Halfway home on the bus we stopped to watch the sunset, and it was one of the finest we’ve