15th March
Dear all,
It's now Thursday and I'm in La Serena, a coastal town 7 hours coach journey north of Santiago. It's about 20 degrees and cloudy - apparently it's always like this, something to do with being so close to the sea.
On my last day in Santiago, I ventured out on my own, navigating the metro to take pictures of the city from the top of a hill with a huge statue of the Virgin Mary on top (she seems to be rather popular here). The way up is in a little train thing attached to another train thing by a single cable - when one goes up, the other goes down. It's VERY steep and there's only one cable and no brakes. Well, it's been running since 1920-something so I guessed the cable would be OK for me... but if it broke, the journey down promised to be significantly faster than the journey up!
Then we had dinner with Igor - the Chilean who owned a vineyard... only he didn't - he was an architect. Huh? Dan got it wrong again. Anyway, it was an odd evening since he only spoke French and Spanish - since Romi's Spanish is bad and mine good enough only to order beer, we spent the evening talking French. Even Romi and I to each other. Odd.
So now we're in La Serena. Tonight we hire a car and go to a rainforest, then visit an observatory (there's lots of really big ones here). Hot springs are in order, a spot of camping, a petrified forest and a place that 'concentrates cosmic energies'. Then off again in a bus for a 21-hour journey to the very north for some high-altitude stuff.
That's all for now. See ya! Dan