This morning I was up at 6:45am and thankfully there were only little spits of rain so I ate breakfast and drank my hot chocolate, packed up and was on my way by 9:30am.
Feeling much better body-wise today, the first part of the trek was a steep uphill cliff - which was testing but not as tough as it had been the day before.
Loads more people today - as this is the popular part of trek - I probably crossed about 300 people both in big and Small tour groups. I arrived at the flash hotel Paine Grande at 12:30 and used their cooking area to cook myself lunch and dry out my sweaty socks.
Lunch was delicious and also made myself a hot cup of tea but unfortunately that made me very relaxed. I didn't like the campsite - very windy and too many people so I continued on towards the free campsite - Italiano. It was hard going and I had some 100km/h winds that made it even more difficult, the sun was out one minute and snow the next - very hard to dress for such weather. After another 2.5 hours I reached the free campsite: Italiano - really nice and I found a good camping spot, set my tent up, packed daypack and headed for the mirador of Valley Frances. I had already walked too far today but this was my only chance to see the valley as tomorrow I would head towards the two towers. I ended up running into Jake and Nancy (go home tomorrow - miss towers) and chatted with them a while. After 1.5 hours of grilling uphill climbing to reach the mirador I was bucketed by heavy snow and rain. I called it quits and headed down with other couple of hikers- much easier going down and only took me 50 minutes. I Packed things and cooked another delicious dinner before hopping into sleeping bag and trying to get warm. I am now ready to finish my hike and be in a warm bed again.