Sunday 9th December Last night was a restless night- maybe the heat or altitude - 2400m. The room was a nice temperature and the bed comfortable but we felt as if we were sleeping on a heap of pebbles in a furnace / fridge. Accordingly we started today feeling grumpy, couldn’t find our belongings, faffed about a lot, muttered about hot, dusty, dirty deserts and generally found fault with everything, including the perfectly decent breakfast! We started the day...

Saturday 8th December There is a major religious festival in Chile today. A huge number of people (hundreds of thousands) are making a pilgrimage to Lo Vasquez sanctuary between Santiago and Valparaiso to celebrate the feast of the immaculate conception. Many of those people make the journey in foot, and so they have closed the motorway. This does rather complicate our journey to the airport! Our departure from hotel Zero was brought forward by 2hrs, but we sta...

Friday 7th December At last - another lie in with a whole day free to please ourselves and explore Valparaiso. We awoke in our beautiful high- celinged room with its lovely wide bay window looking out over the whole of the city, port and coastline below us. Breakfast in the Zero hotel is served at the relaxed time of 9-11 and the best breakfast so far, served to us by a lovely man who has exactly enough English to have a polite conversation, and seems instinc...

Thursday 6th December Today we travelled further north to Valparaiso, just north west of Santiago. We were up at first light, which was just as well as the taxi was early. The hotel staff had left out a flask of coffee and a picnic breakfast for us! The smartly dressed driver in his shiny people carrier took us to the airport via the backroads. It was a lovely drive. The lush countryside looked beautiful with mist in the valleys, and the sun rising from behin...

Wednesday 5th December At last! A lie in until 8.30 am! The day got better with the addition of fresh pineapple, scrambled eggs and home made strawberry jam at breakfast! (And a joyously empty breakfast room..) It was overcast, but previous experience tells us to pack shorts and suncream anyway! After chatting with Josephine we confirmed our impression that we are enjoying unusually hot and dry weather for Chile. Today is our free day to go adventuring in our...