Day 134 - Camp Italiano - Camp Torres

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Today's walk was scheduled to take 6 and a half hours, though Gemma's fierce pacemaking brought this down a bit. On our low resolution map, with 100m interval contour lines, it looked pretty flat and nothing more than a stroll along the edge of a green lake. In fact it was quite up and down, and pretty slow in parts. Well, slow for humans. We were overtaken by a guy on horseback leading a train of 4 horses galloping up a very steep incline. Obviously we'd expect them to be fast, but not THAT fast.

Anyway, we popped into a refugio to use the bathroom and needed uncharacteristic restraint to leave behind the smell of curry coming from the kitchen. The bag of raisins and peanuts didn't taste quite as good after that.

We learnt to ignore the projected timings on the occasional destination signs. Usually they are significant overestimates (ie we walk faster than the 'normal' walker) but the day's final leg was annoyingly longer even though our pace remained unchanged. Either the sign writers are not very good at the calculations or they've got a mean streak.

This campsite was fairly near the park's entrance and there was a luxury hotel there too. The campsite was safely out of sight of the guests though in an extremely inconvenient location. We were left in no doubt where the priority lay! Not wanting to miss out entirely we had a quick look around the hotel (after a shower) and ended up in their bar listening to an English chap ranting about the state of the world these days. Education and youngsters featured repeatedly, along with the phrases 'absolutely disgraceful' and 'what they need to do is...' Incidentally, beers came in at £3.50 a pint, which is more or less Swiss ski resort prices and is 7 times the price we were paying in this country a couple of weeks ago. A bit like price differences between London and the north of England really.

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