cooking. The next day we traveled across a lake by ferry and ready to start our next expedition up the far side of the mountains. From the lake the mountains rose majestically and looked elegant with their heads bedecked in frothy garlands of cloud. What fine weather we were enjoying. We trekked up our new trail against a wind of much more moderate strength but this was suddenly augmented by cutting rain, stinging our faces. We covered one of the packs with a dustbin liner in fear of wet clothes and bedding and plodded on. Opening to our side was a vast lake filling the valley and awash with green ice. In the distance we could see the wind had harbored great ships of this glacial ice against the shore and as we watched smaller boats of ice slid slightly before the wind. We pushed on along the trail not wanting to dally as we had a long way to go before we nightfall. Our water ran out but though our feet were continually in the mud we couldn’t find any clear water to collect. The night drew in and we donned our head torches and started to look nervously into the undergrowth for the feared puma. We’d heard the reports of the fisherman killed a year before and recalled the advice to fight back ferociously if attacked by these huge beasts! Suddenly behind came twinkling lights, our Irish friends had caught us up, and then passed us into the blackness. They called out from time to time which in time led us to stumble onto the beach were they were setting up their tents.

Still no water so I stumbled round by the rapidly fading torch light but searched in vane. I came across another tent on another small beach and received a very angry German response from the closed canvas walls. He too had found no water and was going to report the matter to the authorities – as soon as he reached a place which had any. In the freezing air of the morning we marched on a little way to see the source of these glistening green icebergs bobbing on the water around us. A huge river of ice 100 feet high filled the valley, pushing back against the sides and grinding the rock into small fragments. Warning signs of the beach kept campers well back from the water because the ice would crash into the water with an echoing roar and send tidal waves way up the beach and had washed away tents in the past. The glacier disappeared back through the mountains in to the distance, and from that distant place blew an icy blast so that it was if we stood before a million open refrigerator doors.