20th March
Well now, here's today's issue from the land of very cheap but really rather nice wine.
I'm in La Serena, about to jump on a bus for 21 hours to Iquique in the north. From there we'll be travelling around for a week in a 4WD on the Altiplano about 12,000 feet up.
In short, since my last email: I've missed one earthquake by a day and slept through another one; tried hard to get electrocuted by a shower (a design feature, I understand, to make showering more interesting); hired a car (well, 2 actually, but more about that in a minute); seen lots of desert; played with dolphins, sea lions and penguins; been to two observatories; and not been drunk once!
The earthquakes. First morning in La Serena we spotted on the news pictures of Santiago moving in an unnatural way. It turned out to be an earthquake happening as we watched. Damn, missed it by 24 hours. The next earthquake was this morning - only I was asleep but David assures me that the earth moved for him. Just like the first earthquake I experienced (and the hurricane in '87) I slumbered peacefully.
The shower. It was one of those electric jobs but the hot-making bit was overhead. It wasn't until I lifted my hand a bit too high that I got that unmistakeable zing-wee-zzzzzz feeling that you get when you stick your fingers in a power socket that I realised the shower was not quite up to EEC Health and Safety regulations. My friends said, oh yes, that is quite normal - it tells you not to touch the shower heads in all the guidebooks. Thanks. Moral - read the guidebooks!
The car. We hired the smallest Japanese car you've ever seen (it was cheap). 50km outside La Serena, in the middle of the desert, the gear stick moved all by itself out of 5th gear. The tyre was more lumpy than an average Chilean road. Then braking became less of an exercise in stopping and more of one of noise pollution. On weighing up the options, "return to base" seemed more attractive than a trip to see a petrified forest. We got home safely and received a new and bigger car for the same price, plus a day's free hire. Things always work out as they're supposed to.
The observatories were interesting. We saw a really big telescope that can see stars 11 billion light years away. That means what it sees actually happened 11 billion years ago. We also went to a smaller observatory where we could look through the telescope ourselves - what we saw still happened 17,000 years ago.
Yesterday we jumped on a little boat chartered from a local fisherman and saw sea lions, penguins and dolphins at a reserve off the coast.
C ya! Dan
PS Highest temp we've recorded is 41°C and I have a sunburnt nose!