We woke up feeling a little worse for wear, however the amazing pancakes at breakfast helped get us through!We went over to the fish markets on the other side of town, then walked along the coast for a while, looking at the pretty multicoloured houses on the hills. We then went into town and had a walk around, doing a bit of shopping and failing yet again to get waterproof bag covers! We also had a really good late lunch with local Chilean food, I had stew and ro...

We spent the night in Santiago after arriving back from Easter Island, then headed off to Valparaiso on the coast in the morning. When we had arrived we dropped off our bags we went straight out to join a walking tour in the centre of the old town. It is a really interesting place with UNESCO protection, and the tour was very good. We started at the central plaza, then walked up and around the two most popular hills, cerro Concepcion and cerro alvere. There ar...

On our last day on the island we headed over to the island's museum. It had loads of interesting information about the history of the island and its people, as well as Polynesia generally. I've put a lot of it in the last couple of entries, but the biggest thing that came out from it is how much history is now lost - around the time the Europeans came the people stopped believing in their old customs, and therefore stopped passing it down orally through ...

Today we went scuba diving, it was amazing! The water of the ocean is so clear you can see right to the bottom of the harbour. Whilst we were in all our gear and waiting to go out in our boat we saw three turtles, two adults and a younger one, just swimming around the boats! Wow!!They then took us out to dive. The visibility was amazing, there was loads of coral. There weren't as many fishes as we'd seen diving in Vietnam and Thailand, but they were ve...

Today was a quiet day - as a Sunday most places were closed, so we went to the beach again. I went to church in the morning which was really full - there was a lot of singing and the priest wore a feather headdress not dissimilar to the ones we'd seen on the dancers at the show the night before! Maybe that was more authentic than the coconut bras...?