Today I got a got of a lie in as we didn’t need to start trekking until 7am. The little family of cats were awake when I went for breakfast.

And then another member of the family came and curled up with me whilst I was eating my breakfast.

I took a few photos of the campsite at Marampata, it was a cloudy morning as normal.

So today was the start of the trek back to the starting point. The first couple of hours down to the river were all downhill which felt great. These were some of the views on the way down.

As we got to the bridge I could see the path we had to take to get to the lunch campsite – you can see the zig zag path in the photo below.

We started the uphill climb at around 9am and it took us around an hour and a quarter to reach Chiquisca, a climb of around 350m. These are some views looking back at the river.

We stayed in Chiquisca until 3pm, waiting for the sun to go a bit lower as it’s not much fun hiking uphill in the full sun. We had lunch and just relaxed. I got chatting to some people from another group that were trekking the trail too- they were going to camp in Chiquisca.

At 3pm we set off again for another uphill climb to Cocomansana. Although the sun was lower it was still really hot and it was a difficult climb. But an hour later we were at the campsite – I thought it would take longer so I was pretty pleased. This is one of my favourite pictures I took on the way up.

Just by the campsite there was a small waterfall so we decided to take a lovely refreshing shower. It felt really good after all the walking in the heat.

After the shower we just chilled until dinner time and watched the sun go down. I found another cat to play with but forgot to take a photo.

Just as we sat down to eat I saw this move across the path by where we were sitting.

It certainly made me jump, it’s a tarantula of some kind. The cat decided to play with it and it ran off into the ‘kitchen’. All the rest of the night I was keeping an eye out in case it returned.

It was a beautiful night with the moon almost full. It was also my last night camping. We walked around 13km today, the majority of that was uphill.