Travel snaps
22 - 28 October, Ian
On Saturday we reluctantly moved out of our
downtown apartment at Barrio Brasil and, using the car for the first time since
we moved in, returned to the refugio. When we had moved back after our week in
Argentina Oswaldo greeted us with the two words, "Muy frigo": very cold. This
time the refugio was warmer than when we left, but despite being away for a week
during which there was continuous sun, the solar unit could only give us an hour
of electricity on our first evening. While we'd been away Oswaldo had cleaned
and filled the pool that we'd so looked forward to before we first arrived and
the following day the girls were able to have their first swim in it. With the
sun shining it was lovely to sit outside and read. The view is beautiful over
the wooded hills down to Santiago and across to the far mountains, and the
grounds that Oswaldo spends his day working on are rich in fruit trees and
perfumed creepers. If only it wasn't for the
house...
This hour that we snatched outside on Sunday was the last, at least so far: since then it has been cloudy, and although we've only actually had rain during the night, the house is cold and uncomfortable. We've been finding warmth and electricity at the mall, and this is partly why I've been enjoying doing my web chores at Starbucks so much.
One new on line interest I've developed over the past week or so is monitoring traffic on this blog. I finally got round to wiring in some monitoring software. The first time I looked at the output it was (to me) fascinating and seemed as though it could become addictive. There are charts showing place of origin of visitors, time of visit, browser used and so on and so on. However, the general characteristic of information available on the internet is that the ostensible precision is not matched by actual accuracy, and this is the same in the case of the data I'm getting. I almost immediately discovered that the reports on place of origin, duration of visit and whether or not a visitor is returning are all unreliable. Trying to make out individual visitors from the graphics is as hopeless as looking for the Higgs boson. And when you can't trust the data the fascination wanes.
Even despite the shortcomings, it has been interesting to see some macro-level patterns. As I suspected, there is a lot more unpredictable traffic on the blog than on the homepage. I can't tell whether there are people hitting as a result of Google searches because only visits to the newest entries are visible to me, but the unexpected phenomenon has been the number of visitors coming from general blog watching sites. The first time I looked I saw that someone from Korea had just checked in (Hi!). To switch metaphors, watching these charts is like listening to a Geiger counter. Even though these hits from wanderers across the blogosphere seem to form the numerical majority based upon the stat's I've seen so far, I can't stop myself writing to you (the people I know out there) about them (these blog grazers).
One of my other web chores is updating my podcasts. A few days ago I listened to an interview on Democracy Now with Robert Fisk, the foreign correspondent who writes for The Independent. It was excellent and if you can you should read the transcript, or better still download the podcast (dated 20 Oct), from www.democracynow.org . His new book is going onto my Amazon list that I'll be ordering for our arrival in Aus.
One of the baristas at Starbucks also recommended a hairdresser to me in the mall and I had my third haircut since we've been away. Like the haircut I had in Maine, which was one of my worst ever, this one was surprisingly quick - so much so that I'm not sure if a haircut at Tony & Guy doesn't work out to be cheaper when measured in dollars per minute.
For all of the shortcomings of our accommodation, our month here is not dominated by our trips to the mall. On Monday we went to one of the country's most popular and successful institutions: the Concha y Toro winery. Naturally, Lonely Planet recommended another place but the distinctive feature of the Chilean wine industry isn't a clan of ancient families who've cultivated parcels of special terroir over generations but the nexus of large growers who have industrialised high volume production of good wine, and I wanted to see the biggest. We weren't disappointed. I learnt things. For example, when there's a frost they get helicopters to fly over the premium vines to make warm air circulate through the cold. The vines that we were led round were set close to impressive established gardens of a Victorian English character, and there was an Italianate colonial-style house that was actually constructed from adobe and plastered over to give the right effect. But the key interest lay not in how well the big guns of yesteryear had simulated a European Aristocratic idyll but in how successful the wines were. (Just before we left I missed the documentary film about the wine industry that plays up the differences between the New World winemakers and the traditional terroiristes. I really want to see this when we return.)
Before we got to try any wine the lady who showed us round gave us some didactic pointers that seemed engagingly dated. "You can have this wine with pasta and white sauce but not pasta with meat sauce." "It's bad to make a popping noise when you pull out the cork." "Uncork the wine at least an hour before you drink it."
Like a lot of people I'm sceptical about how much aeration you can get through a square centimetre at the opening of the bottle's neck: if it's worth getting a wine to breath then decant it. I did get a surprise though. Our first glass was a carmenere (from their Casillera del Diablo range), which is a grape that got wiped out in France by phylloxera but resurfaced in Chile, where the early wine-makers had exported it. We did the sniffing and tasting thing and, after drinking most of it, left a little in the glass. About 20 minutes later we sniffed it again and the aroma had completely changed. I've experienced this in decent wines and tannic wines but never so much in a relatively inexpensive and soft wine. Our second wine was a cabernet sauvignon from the flagship Don Melchor brand, which was fine but confirmed my view that Chile's strength is in the quality of its affordable rather than its top wines.
A central part of the guided tour was a visit around the Casillero del Diablo cellar. It was here that I came especially to like the woman who was taking us round. The cellar is a raw marketing exercise, and is far too small to house the huge number of barrels needed for all of the Casillero del Diablo wines. Instead they have a myth about how the first owner put around the story that the devil stalked through the vault in order to dissuade the locals from stealing his wines (why not just lock the door?). Casillero del Diablo as it appears on their labels is a brand rather than a mark of specific provenance. Our woman distanced herself from the commentary that was piped through the cellar with one of her several apologetic references to its American nature, just has she had let us know that the oenologists insisted that she tell us to uncork our bottles silently, and also that she was supposed to point out to us the best spot for photography. We all liked her, I think. We went round in a small English-speaking party, the rest of whom were Americans. One of the other guys was a marine - I've met several marines over the years and warmed to them all.
This week we had another first: we met up with David and Ewa, whom we'd first met at The Black Sheep Inn, making them the first people whom we'd met in two different countries this year (although Corsican nationalists who claim that France is a separate country from Corsica might say that Stephanie and Reynald were the first). They now live and work in Hong Kong but Dave grew up in Teignmouth in Devon, not too from our home, and Ewa grew up in Poland. Even knowing how inhospitable our place in Santiago was they came over and had dinner with us and then spent the night in our bad bedding. In the day we revisited the Plaza de Armas together, primarily so that Dave could take some photographs for the Insight guides.
Ewa is also documenting her travels on film but in a different way: she's carrying around a state-of-the-art Sony HD (High Definition) camcorder. If you're reading incredibly closely, you may recall that she shot some HD video of Zoe on the zipline while we were at the Black Sheep Inn. She has footage of the fantastic places that she and Dave are travelling to - she showed us some video of penguins in Torres del Paine that I'd love to sit down and watch properly if it ever came on TV.
Dave is at the other end of the tech spectrum: he's one of the last serious photographers still to be using a film camera. Being with someone doing this professionally gives you a very different perspective on taking snaps: without meaning to, I found myself starting to try to take photo's of colourful locals and angles on the distinctive buildings. Dave himself doesn't really get the appeal of taking friends and family photos, whereas for me recording our passage around the world and snapping the girls at as they grow up is almost the whole point of my photography. As an example of the difference, here's the snap that David rated as my shot of the day - the reflected building is the catherdral:
I like it but it wont be making my homepage collection for South America.
The next morning the six of us drove out to Vina del Mar on the coast. Deciding where to stay was a good exercise in group compromise. Dave and Ewa are moving around a lot on their travels and so have to stick to a tight discipline on expenditure. In contrast, we've booked (and often paid for) 95%+ of our accommodation in advance so on the few times when we do hit hotels for a day or so it's coming out of our discretionary budget for treats. When we rolled into town we first checked out a budget place from the cheap category of Lonely Planet. Paula and I rejected the nylon sheets and loo on a different floor and then, restraining ourselves from going four star, we found an apartment room in a mid range place that met Dave and Ewa's budgetary guidelines and our minimum standards for a special break.
The sea front at Vina del Mar could be Mediterranean. If you walk past the grand, very white casino and along the sandy beach and turn to look inland you're faced with a wall of apartment blocks that must give their inhabitants spectacular views from the picture windows. They all look very smart, although upon closer inspection some of the facades have shed large chunks of plaster and are tattier than they first seem. If I ever write a novel about an ageing Nazi fugitive he'll live in one of them - with his dog.
The same sense of grandeur threatening to fade characterised the restaurant where we had dinner last night. It was in a hotel that stood right in the sea and was styled like a ship; if we'd been on our own we may have stayed there. The windows looked right out onto the sea and pelicans and seals could be seen just outside. Even so, you could almost see the downward tracks carved by fingernails desperately seeking to keep a hold on a disappearing Forties splendour. On our table we had a great time. As far as I could see the only other customers were a party of older British guys, presumably business people; I wanted to ask them what they were up to in Val de Mar but they left before I got a chance.
Yesterday we walked round Valparaiso, which until then had only had any existence for me on the label of wine bottles. In fact it's Chile second largest city and when you're there you'd never think that it had any link with wine. On our way we encountered one of Lonely Planet's most impressive disconnections from reality: an entire coastal rail system was missing. To be fair, this was due to modernisation works rather than rank carelessness on LP's part, though I do suspect that a diligent researcher in 2003 (the current edition, at least when we left) may have been able to discover that the work was planned. In any case, a policeman flagged down a bus for us, which was just as convenient.
While Vina del Mar seems to hover on the borderline between luxury and poverty, Valparaiso is unambiguously a shanty town packed onto the hills radiating from around the port, studded with some classic civic buildings, all of which (as far as I could see) serve the military. The exception is the city's only truly conspicuous building: the Congreso Nacional, though since this was established under Pinochet it's probably not unfair to regard this as another military building. I can't think of any other country in the world whose parliament is not based in the capital (can you?) - isn't this the definition of a capital city? The Congreso Nacional buildings are stuck right next to the bus station and across the road from some of the grimmest slums. But it is still a successful landmark in my opinion.
There are two factors that make Valparaiso fun to walk around. The first is the system of funicular railways, or ascensores, that run from El Plan, where all the civic buildings are, up into the shanty town warrens. There are 15 of them on the LP city map and David led us on a route around the city that took us up and down several. They are barely signed at all and the entrances to them are extremely discreet. Inside, each of them features a Victorian turnstile at the top and the bottom and a couple of old box cars creaking up and down a steep slope on a cable. The city's second fun factor is the appearance of the houses: they're painted bright colours so that when you view any particular barrio from across the hills it looks like a Hansel and Gretel town made of candy. Even the corrugated tin sheeting, which is one of the most widely used building materials, is brightly painted. Power lines run over the streets in dense spaghetti bundles, as though each new appliance draws a new cable from the nearest pole rather than having organised ring mains in each house.
I've written before that the world travelling community crystallises around a surprising limited number of itineraries, and in Valparaiso I saw the formation of one of these in action: David sought out viewpoints identified in Lonely Planet from which to take photographs for an Insight guide. You can understand how they all tend to converge. (In fact, because the LP map is so imprecise we ironically ended up stumbling across better viewpoints.)
Apart from the ascensores in general, the highlight of the day for me was an outdoor exhibition of body painting art displayed on a glade of ten foot high boards outside the admiralty building. It was a fabulous exhibition in its own right but doubly so for the juxtaposition with the admiralty building and attendant staff. Here, to be going on with, is a snap showing details from a couple of the boards (the policeman was on duty, not on show); I'll maybe put one or two more in my next set of web slides:
The cathedral and the churches don't make much of a contribution to Valparaiso's architecture: the cathedral is faced in blank render and its arcades running along the most salient avenue have been turned into shops. Even so, the woman sitting next to me on the bus as we left town genuflected as we passed by.
This morning we left our mid range room and drove up the coast to a beach about 30 km north of Vina del Mar. While people in the North East of America were tuned into Wolf Blitzer to learn whether the latest round of criminal activity in the Bush administration reached up to the President's chief of staff or "only" up to the chief of staff of the Vice President, we were down in the South West of the continent sitting on a sunny beach with a nice picnic and cold Bolivian beer. It was a quiet and beautiful beach, moderately busy with the local young playing volleyball and blasting out South American music. For Ewa and David this was a rare day of travelling without travelling. Talking to them has brought home to me how different our time away is than that of most travellers, not especially because we avoid budget accommodation and day-long bus journeys but because our primary experience is of exploring some more in the same locale that we were in the day before.
Returning back to Valparaiso to drop off Dave and Ewa, we took the coastal road and had the unexpected pleasure of seeing a dozen or more pelicans in the sea and on the rocks at the roadside; again, expect a photo. The spot where we got out to see them was what Americans might call the toniest of the places we've seen these few days. It's where the drivers of German cars hang out. From here down the route south to Vina del Mar and then to Valparaiso (they appear as one continuous settlement when viewed from across the sea) we tracked a gradient of descending wealth all the way to the bus station.
We look forward to seeing Ewa and David again and wish them well on the rest of their travels in the meantime. For now, we're back in Santiago for a couple more nights (same place - I just had to club another cockroach) and then off to French Polynesia. I may be unable to post any more blogs until we reach Australia towards the end of November.
Ian
This hour that we snatched outside on Sunday was the last, at least so far: since then it has been cloudy, and although we've only actually had rain during the night, the house is cold and uncomfortable. We've been finding warmth and electricity at the mall, and this is partly why I've been enjoying doing my web chores at Starbucks so much.
One new on line interest I've developed over the past week or so is monitoring traffic on this blog. I finally got round to wiring in some monitoring software. The first time I looked at the output it was (to me) fascinating and seemed as though it could become addictive. There are charts showing place of origin of visitors, time of visit, browser used and so on and so on. However, the general characteristic of information available on the internet is that the ostensible precision is not matched by actual accuracy, and this is the same in the case of the data I'm getting. I almost immediately discovered that the reports on place of origin, duration of visit and whether or not a visitor is returning are all unreliable. Trying to make out individual visitors from the graphics is as hopeless as looking for the Higgs boson. And when you can't trust the data the fascination wanes.
Even despite the shortcomings, it has been interesting to see some macro-level patterns. As I suspected, there is a lot more unpredictable traffic on the blog than on the homepage. I can't tell whether there are people hitting as a result of Google searches because only visits to the newest entries are visible to me, but the unexpected phenomenon has been the number of visitors coming from general blog watching sites. The first time I looked I saw that someone from Korea had just checked in (Hi!). To switch metaphors, watching these charts is like listening to a Geiger counter. Even though these hits from wanderers across the blogosphere seem to form the numerical majority based upon the stat's I've seen so far, I can't stop myself writing to you (the people I know out there) about them (these blog grazers).
One of my other web chores is updating my podcasts. A few days ago I listened to an interview on Democracy Now with Robert Fisk, the foreign correspondent who writes for The Independent. It was excellent and if you can you should read the transcript, or better still download the podcast (dated 20 Oct), from www.democracynow.org . His new book is going onto my Amazon list that I'll be ordering for our arrival in Aus.
One of the baristas at Starbucks also recommended a hairdresser to me in the mall and I had my third haircut since we've been away. Like the haircut I had in Maine, which was one of my worst ever, this one was surprisingly quick - so much so that I'm not sure if a haircut at Tony & Guy doesn't work out to be cheaper when measured in dollars per minute.
For all of the shortcomings of our accommodation, our month here is not dominated by our trips to the mall. On Monday we went to one of the country's most popular and successful institutions: the Concha y Toro winery. Naturally, Lonely Planet recommended another place but the distinctive feature of the Chilean wine industry isn't a clan of ancient families who've cultivated parcels of special terroir over generations but the nexus of large growers who have industrialised high volume production of good wine, and I wanted to see the biggest. We weren't disappointed. I learnt things. For example, when there's a frost they get helicopters to fly over the premium vines to make warm air circulate through the cold. The vines that we were led round were set close to impressive established gardens of a Victorian English character, and there was an Italianate colonial-style house that was actually constructed from adobe and plastered over to give the right effect. But the key interest lay not in how well the big guns of yesteryear had simulated a European Aristocratic idyll but in how successful the wines were. (Just before we left I missed the documentary film about the wine industry that plays up the differences between the New World winemakers and the traditional terroiristes. I really want to see this when we return.)
Before we got to try any wine the lady who showed us round gave us some didactic pointers that seemed engagingly dated. "You can have this wine with pasta and white sauce but not pasta with meat sauce." "It's bad to make a popping noise when you pull out the cork." "Uncork the wine at least an hour before you drink it."
Like a lot of people I'm sceptical about how much aeration you can get through a square centimetre at the opening of the bottle's neck: if it's worth getting a wine to breath then decant it. I did get a surprise though. Our first glass was a carmenere (from their Casillera del Diablo range), which is a grape that got wiped out in France by phylloxera but resurfaced in Chile, where the early wine-makers had exported it. We did the sniffing and tasting thing and, after drinking most of it, left a little in the glass. About 20 minutes later we sniffed it again and the aroma had completely changed. I've experienced this in decent wines and tannic wines but never so much in a relatively inexpensive and soft wine. Our second wine was a cabernet sauvignon from the flagship Don Melchor brand, which was fine but confirmed my view that Chile's strength is in the quality of its affordable rather than its top wines.
A central part of the guided tour was a visit around the Casillero del Diablo cellar. It was here that I came especially to like the woman who was taking us round. The cellar is a raw marketing exercise, and is far too small to house the huge number of barrels needed for all of the Casillero del Diablo wines. Instead they have a myth about how the first owner put around the story that the devil stalked through the vault in order to dissuade the locals from stealing his wines (why not just lock the door?). Casillero del Diablo as it appears on their labels is a brand rather than a mark of specific provenance. Our woman distanced herself from the commentary that was piped through the cellar with one of her several apologetic references to its American nature, just has she had let us know that the oenologists insisted that she tell us to uncork our bottles silently, and also that she was supposed to point out to us the best spot for photography. We all liked her, I think. We went round in a small English-speaking party, the rest of whom were Americans. One of the other guys was a marine - I've met several marines over the years and warmed to them all.
This week we had another first: we met up with David and Ewa, whom we'd first met at The Black Sheep Inn, making them the first people whom we'd met in two different countries this year (although Corsican nationalists who claim that France is a separate country from Corsica might say that Stephanie and Reynald were the first). They now live and work in Hong Kong but Dave grew up in Teignmouth in Devon, not too from our home, and Ewa grew up in Poland. Even knowing how inhospitable our place in Santiago was they came over and had dinner with us and then spent the night in our bad bedding. In the day we revisited the Plaza de Armas together, primarily so that Dave could take some photographs for the Insight guides.
Ewa is also documenting her travels on film but in a different way: she's carrying around a state-of-the-art Sony HD (High Definition) camcorder. If you're reading incredibly closely, you may recall that she shot some HD video of Zoe on the zipline while we were at the Black Sheep Inn. She has footage of the fantastic places that she and Dave are travelling to - she showed us some video of penguins in Torres del Paine that I'd love to sit down and watch properly if it ever came on TV.
Dave is at the other end of the tech spectrum: he's one of the last serious photographers still to be using a film camera. Being with someone doing this professionally gives you a very different perspective on taking snaps: without meaning to, I found myself starting to try to take photo's of colourful locals and angles on the distinctive buildings. Dave himself doesn't really get the appeal of taking friends and family photos, whereas for me recording our passage around the world and snapping the girls at as they grow up is almost the whole point of my photography. As an example of the difference, here's the snap that David rated as my shot of the day - the reflected building is the catherdral:
I like it but it wont be making my homepage collection for South America.
The next morning the six of us drove out to Vina del Mar on the coast. Deciding where to stay was a good exercise in group compromise. Dave and Ewa are moving around a lot on their travels and so have to stick to a tight discipline on expenditure. In contrast, we've booked (and often paid for) 95%+ of our accommodation in advance so on the few times when we do hit hotels for a day or so it's coming out of our discretionary budget for treats. When we rolled into town we first checked out a budget place from the cheap category of Lonely Planet. Paula and I rejected the nylon sheets and loo on a different floor and then, restraining ourselves from going four star, we found an apartment room in a mid range place that met Dave and Ewa's budgetary guidelines and our minimum standards for a special break.
The sea front at Vina del Mar could be Mediterranean. If you walk past the grand, very white casino and along the sandy beach and turn to look inland you're faced with a wall of apartment blocks that must give their inhabitants spectacular views from the picture windows. They all look very smart, although upon closer inspection some of the facades have shed large chunks of plaster and are tattier than they first seem. If I ever write a novel about an ageing Nazi fugitive he'll live in one of them - with his dog.
The same sense of grandeur threatening to fade characterised the restaurant where we had dinner last night. It was in a hotel that stood right in the sea and was styled like a ship; if we'd been on our own we may have stayed there. The windows looked right out onto the sea and pelicans and seals could be seen just outside. Even so, you could almost see the downward tracks carved by fingernails desperately seeking to keep a hold on a disappearing Forties splendour. On our table we had a great time. As far as I could see the only other customers were a party of older British guys, presumably business people; I wanted to ask them what they were up to in Val de Mar but they left before I got a chance.
Yesterday we walked round Valparaiso, which until then had only had any existence for me on the label of wine bottles. In fact it's Chile second largest city and when you're there you'd never think that it had any link with wine. On our way we encountered one of Lonely Planet's most impressive disconnections from reality: an entire coastal rail system was missing. To be fair, this was due to modernisation works rather than rank carelessness on LP's part, though I do suspect that a diligent researcher in 2003 (the current edition, at least when we left) may have been able to discover that the work was planned. In any case, a policeman flagged down a bus for us, which was just as convenient.
While Vina del Mar seems to hover on the borderline between luxury and poverty, Valparaiso is unambiguously a shanty town packed onto the hills radiating from around the port, studded with some classic civic buildings, all of which (as far as I could see) serve the military. The exception is the city's only truly conspicuous building: the Congreso Nacional, though since this was established under Pinochet it's probably not unfair to regard this as another military building. I can't think of any other country in the world whose parliament is not based in the capital (can you?) - isn't this the definition of a capital city? The Congreso Nacional buildings are stuck right next to the bus station and across the road from some of the grimmest slums. But it is still a successful landmark in my opinion.
There are two factors that make Valparaiso fun to walk around. The first is the system of funicular railways, or ascensores, that run from El Plan, where all the civic buildings are, up into the shanty town warrens. There are 15 of them on the LP city map and David led us on a route around the city that took us up and down several. They are barely signed at all and the entrances to them are extremely discreet. Inside, each of them features a Victorian turnstile at the top and the bottom and a couple of old box cars creaking up and down a steep slope on a cable. The city's second fun factor is the appearance of the houses: they're painted bright colours so that when you view any particular barrio from across the hills it looks like a Hansel and Gretel town made of candy. Even the corrugated tin sheeting, which is one of the most widely used building materials, is brightly painted. Power lines run over the streets in dense spaghetti bundles, as though each new appliance draws a new cable from the nearest pole rather than having organised ring mains in each house.
I've written before that the world travelling community crystallises around a surprising limited number of itineraries, and in Valparaiso I saw the formation of one of these in action: David sought out viewpoints identified in Lonely Planet from which to take photographs for an Insight guide. You can understand how they all tend to converge. (In fact, because the LP map is so imprecise we ironically ended up stumbling across better viewpoints.)
Apart from the ascensores in general, the highlight of the day for me was an outdoor exhibition of body painting art displayed on a glade of ten foot high boards outside the admiralty building. It was a fabulous exhibition in its own right but doubly so for the juxtaposition with the admiralty building and attendant staff. Here, to be going on with, is a snap showing details from a couple of the boards (the policeman was on duty, not on show); I'll maybe put one or two more in my next set of web slides:
The cathedral and the churches don't make much of a contribution to Valparaiso's architecture: the cathedral is faced in blank render and its arcades running along the most salient avenue have been turned into shops. Even so, the woman sitting next to me on the bus as we left town genuflected as we passed by.
This morning we left our mid range room and drove up the coast to a beach about 30 km north of Vina del Mar. While people in the North East of America were tuned into Wolf Blitzer to learn whether the latest round of criminal activity in the Bush administration reached up to the President's chief of staff or "only" up to the chief of staff of the Vice President, we were down in the South West of the continent sitting on a sunny beach with a nice picnic and cold Bolivian beer. It was a quiet and beautiful beach, moderately busy with the local young playing volleyball and blasting out South American music. For Ewa and David this was a rare day of travelling without travelling. Talking to them has brought home to me how different our time away is than that of most travellers, not especially because we avoid budget accommodation and day-long bus journeys but because our primary experience is of exploring some more in the same locale that we were in the day before.
Returning back to Valparaiso to drop off Dave and Ewa, we took the coastal road and had the unexpected pleasure of seeing a dozen or more pelicans in the sea and on the rocks at the roadside; again, expect a photo. The spot where we got out to see them was what Americans might call the toniest of the places we've seen these few days. It's where the drivers of German cars hang out. From here down the route south to Vina del Mar and then to Valparaiso (they appear as one continuous settlement when viewed from across the sea) we tracked a gradient of descending wealth all the way to the bus station.
We look forward to seeing Ewa and David again and wish them well on the rest of their travels in the meantime. For now, we're back in Santiago for a couple more nights (same place - I just had to club another cockroach) and then off to French Polynesia. I may be unable to post any more blogs until we reach Australia towards the end of November.
Ian
Posted: Wed - October 26, 2005 at 08:45 AM
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Published On: Nov 12, 2005 03:01 PM
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Published On: Nov 12, 2005 03:01 PM