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, 7 hours north of Santiago, about to jump on a bus where I'll be for 21 hours (mmmm, what fun) to Iquique in the north.  Here we'll be travelling around for a week in a 4WD on the Altiplano about 12,000 feet up (altitude sickness kicks in at about 10,000 feet so that'll be interesting).  So that's enuf of what we're about to do, here's what we've done. 

In short, 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, been to rainforest that was well, more a small coppice with some cloud kind of near it, explored an enchanted valley, been to a fortified wine brewery factory thing and not been drunk once!

First, the earthquakes.  First morning in La Serena we spotted on the news pictures of Santiago moving in an unnatural way with things falling off buildings.  It turned out to be an earthquake that was happening as we watched.  Damn.  Missed it by 24 hours.  Next earthquake was this morning, only I was asleep but David assures me that the earth moved for him and the window shook, even though his wife, Romi, was asleep next to him.  Just like the first earthquake I experienced (and the hurricane in '87) I slumbered peacefully. 

Next, the shower.  It was one of those electric jobs but the hot making bit was overhead.  I noticed the first time I used it, I got an odd, but not altogether unpleasant, buzzy sort of feeling and lines appeared in front of my eyes when I got my head quite close to the shower.  This happened every time I used the shower over the last 2 days, but it wasn't until this morning when I lifted my hand a bit too high that I got that unmistakeable zing weee 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.  When discussing this with my friends, they 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!

Now the car.  We hired the smallest Japanese car you've ever seen (it was cheap).  50 klicks outside La Serena, in the middle of the desert, the gear stick moved all by itself out of 5th gear.  Interesting feature we thought and carried on.  5 minutes later, weeeeeee goes the engine and we're in neutral again.  The carried on for while until it no longer proved possible to put it into 5th (nor reverse we found out later at an inconvenient moment).  OK, we can deal with this.  Next we spotted that one rear wheel was more of an irregular square than the  nice comfortable circle that it was supposed to be.  In addition, the tyre was more lumpy than an average Chilean road.  Rear wheel blow out we thought - we can handle that.  Carry on.  Next, braking became less of an exercise in stopping and more of one of noise pollution - the poor little thing didn't want us to stop and when we tried it screamed in protest.  It was having such fun with us.  On weighing up the options we felt that, on balance, "return to base" seemed more attractive than a trip to see a petrified forest.  On starting off, I noticed that exhaust had become more tuneful than when we left - the silencer, wasn't!  Good fun!  Well, we got home safely and a new and bigger car for the same price, 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 - spooky.  That means what it sees actually happened 11 billion years ago.  Time travel?  We also went to a smaller observatory where we could look through the telescope ourselves.  That was cool looking at the Milky Way, Orion's belt and other stuff.  But what we saw still happened 17,000 years ago!!!!  Whoa. 

Yesterday we drove into more desert (I saw proper sand dunes for the first time ever) jumped on a little boat (big enuf for 8 people) chartered from local fisherman and saw sea lions, penguins and dolphins at a reserve off the coast.  That was cool.  The fisherman caught barracuda on the way back - six in about 15 minutes.  That was cool too (the one that got away leaving only its lower jaw on the hook made me think - ooh I bet that stung!)

The other things we've done are standard touristy stuff that I won't bore you with.  You'll have to wait for the photies for that!  So enuf from me for now (I'm sure you'll agree!)  I'll write again soon.

C ya!

Dan

PS Highest temp we've recorded is 41 degrees C and I have a sun burnt nose!

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