Ola!

2 blogs in 3 days.......a bit of reading for you all whilst your ´working´ hard!!

So onto the first country that doesnt have English as one of its native launguages, and even getting a taxi from the airport to the centre of Santiago took a bit of time. We made it there in the end though, and then found a hostel as we tried to stay awake, the 39 hour day was starting to take its toll on both of us, literally the longest day of our lives! We only had 4 full days in Chile and we´ve made the most of them, we´ve taken the cable car up one of the mountains to where there is a massive statue of the virgin Mary overlooking the city, it was also a pretty good view of the whole of Santiago which is a massive city. We then took a walk around the centre of the city to see the sights, took a picture with a couple of policemen outside one of the buildings, it was abit like the houses of parliment in london, except we thought we better not try and make them laugh, would of been hard to explain!

The following day we went skiing to El Colorado, which is about an hours drive from Santiago, we got picked up from the hostel by a bloke who loved driving, i think he really wished he was a racing driver, but if he was he´d need a horn in his car, he must of beeped at about 30-40 people on the way back to the shop to get geared up, it was about a 15 minute drive! We got kitted out with the works, they also labelled our gear, asking our names, they got Ýak´ for Jack and ´Crist´ for me! We jumped on another bus and headed up to the mountains, getting out on the slopes at about 11am, we had to be back on the bus at 5pm so we had a good 6 hours to put in some major skiing! Yak was pretty good as he´d been quite recently but it was my first time skiing since year 8 at school, probably about 10 years ago! So we took it easy on the green slopes for a couple of tries, on the first go i was well happy as i´d not fallen down and was going pretty fast the whole way, I then tried to stop and ended up in a heap on the floor, lesson 1, learn to stop before going fast! I also managed to lose my lift pass in the fall, but luckily found it again, it could only get better! Yak was off zooming down the slopes whilst i got my bearings back, i even spotted him getting a little jump in here and their from the ski lift. We then met back up at the top of the first slope to try something a little harder, we got on the ski lifts that just pull you along, abit like a zip wire, just going up hill. As we were reaching the higest point on the mountain Yak managed to fall off of his lift and said ill meet you at thebottom of this one! So i carried on and got to the top, lovely views, would of been nice if their was another way down other than skiing, too steep and narrow for my liking, but their were little kids getting off the ski lift so i just went for it, doing well until about 30m down the slope, then taking a tumble and not being able to stop for about a further 40m when i manged to hit the wooden fence seperating the slopes, great success, no broken bones just a quick adrenaline buzz! We then spent the rest of the day going down some of the intermediate slopes with Yak going on a few more of the red ones. For the last couple of runs, i faced the red one again and luckily no repeat of the first attempt! It was well good, the views around the mountain were amazing and it was a great day for skiing, for the last run we went right to the top again and then fired down the whole slope until we were at the bottom and had to get the bus home, all in all a quality day.

We spent the next day chilling out, it was much needed after skiing, so not much to write home about their! We went to Valparaiso today, which is a very old city on the coast of Chile, about a 2hours drive from Santiago, it was a nice place, but you could see how old it was as it was quite shabby! We spent a couple of hours just wandering around and seeing what was their, climbing many hills as apparently their are a total of 45 hills in the city! We then had lunch and got the coach back. Tomorrow we head off to Argentina on our first mega coach ride, 20hours!

Hope everyone is ok and your enjoying the English summer,

Muchos Love

Crist and Yak

xxx