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.  But 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 that is 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.  Hmmm.  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!  Next was down on a cable car - never done one of those before - bit rickety but it also seemed to work. 

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 order beer (well what do you expect) 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, all looking for UFO's 'n stuff).  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

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