Greetings from Puerto Varas - about 25km from Puerto Montt on the shores of Lake Llanquihue (which means "deep water") (wonder how they worked that out?). My hotel is the Bellavista and for once the billing lives up to the name - it is on the lake front & from my room - (complete with balcony) i can see the volcano Osorno in the distance. Osorno does a passable imitation of Mount Fuji - with the cone covered in snow. Calbuco - an extinct volcano - can be seen off to the right.

I don't know how many of you will have heard about this but a volcano 6 miles from the Chilean town of Chaiten erupted on the 20th February - many of the 4,500 inhabitants are refusing to leave the town despite government attempts to evacuate the area. The volcano last erupted in May 2008.......

Osorno is dormant......

The main industry around here is fish farming - yet another of man's follies. Fish farming is where you attempt to breed fish but instead create reservoirs of infection and end up filling the water & the fish with antibiotics in order to get rid of the parasitic sea lice and create environmental havoc. The Chilean government is issuing no new licences to farm fish & once the current concessions have expired then that will be it...

Some of the farmed salmon have - of course escaped - and now there are salmon in the lakes & waterways around here - remember the trout story from Tierra del Fuego?

Quite a lot of this region suffered deforestation and the government seems quite keen on planting - yes, you guessed it - eucalypts - for heaven's sake - a child of 6 could tell them the folly of doing that......

For all that, i like Chile - what i've seen is lovely & the people are friendly. It seems quite an efficient & organised country - that one border crossing aside. The economy appears to be in reasonable shape, too. The same is true of Argentina - a beautiful country with friendly folk - although the economy has never been in great shape - or, at least, never for very long. The Argentinians regard recessions with resigned bemusement. It will be interesting to see how Santiago compares with Buenos Aires....

The hosteria in Torres del Paine aside, Chile is reasonable value too, for Brits whose currency is on parity with the USD & the Euro these days. Argentina & Brazil are both quite expensive by comparison - more on a par with UK prices - hmmm :-/

I've just seen another Toyota FJ Cruiser - i saw one in Montevideo - a strange looking 4x4 - hmmm... - they also have things called "Durango" - this is yet another hopeless Dodge vehicle - a huge & ungainly 4x4 but surprisingly - depressingly - popular here

The flight from Punta Arenas to Puerto Montt last night should have taken 2hrs 15 minutes but good old Lan Chile did it in an hour & 45 minutes - nice going, LC! Reading their in-flight magazine i see that the average age of their fleet is 5 years - which is pretty impressive - in Europe i would think only EasyJet & Ryannair could match that - the average age of aircraft in the Argentinas Aeriolinas fleet must be around 25 to 30 :-/

The President of Chile is Michelle Bachelet - elected on 15th January 2006 - she seems to be very popular. The main complaint seems to be that, with around 6m of the 16.5m population living in Santiago, everything seems to be pretty much centered around the capital. It must be quite a difficult country to manage as it is about 2,700 miles long and only 150 miles at its widest point.... - with an area of around 757,000 sq.km, it is one of the smaller countries in South America (38th largest in size in the world). Compare that to Brazil at 8.5m sq km (no.5) and Argentina at 2.8m sq km (no.8). For comparison Australia is 7.7m sq.km (no.6); NZ is 267,000 sq km (no.74) - while the UK is 244,000 sq km (no 77)....

Argentina also has a lady president - Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner - she became president in October 2007.

Next stop Santiago - rice is nice and sago, too but Santiago's good for you - those childhood rhymes coming back, eh? That one courtesy of the fragrant pen of Lady Ambrosia, clearly.....