Once I signed off last time I had a quiet couple of hours in my room repacking my bags which had somehow managed to spread themselves out over the 3 days and catching up on my old fashioned written diary while watching a cheesy Christmas film.

Time to get ready for dinner and Nikki did my hair and makeup before we met up to get a taxi to the restaurant. Now, being in Bolivia I had quite a few doubts about how this dinner would turn out - I wasn't expecting everything to go to plan. We arrived to find that no tables had yet been set up for us. They though we were coming at 6.30pm, not 6pm even though Ross had sent several emails and called twice. No worries, that was soon fixed.

We sat down, on 2 separate tables and were asked for our drink order. Then, a waitress came around to take our order. Now, Ross had already given them numbers for the turkey dinner, vegetarian dinner (spinach & ricotta cannelloni) and 3 people who wanted to order off the menu. They then said we could change our mind and order off the menu and pay the menu price instead of the US$20 we were going to pay for Turkey. 15 mins later, she came back and said she was wrong and if you ordered off the menu you would still pay $20. Confusion - I stuck with turkey - we were just hoping it had been put in the oven already otherwise we were in trouble.

While we were waiting it was time to do our Secret Santa gifts. No one was volunteering to be Santa so I offered to be Mrs Clause - this would definitely get me in the Christmas spirit and it did. There were some great presents and most people were happy. There was only really one present in bad taste. I got a Inca Kola t-shirt and some snail dribble face cream (apparently good for sunburn). For those of you that don't know, Inca Kola is like Peru´s national drink. It is yellow and tastes like creaming soda, not bad but very sweet.

Slowly the meals came out and I can say it was very good - much better than expected. However there was a problem with the vege meal. They came out with a menu and told them to order a meal off the menu and this was after our dinners had come out. One of the girls wasn't feeling the best so she said to cancel hers and not worry. Eventually the other meal came out and it was like a stirfry. So they took that back and got something different. It was a shame because our little group were having a great time but the other table not so good. We also got a dessert and glass of champagne.

Everyone put their money on the table to pay and started to leave. We got back to the hotel and as we got there, there was a phone call from some people left at the restaurant to say the bill was short. Ross told them to cover it and it would have to be sorted tomorrow, there was nothing he could do. So when they got back, they were pretty upset. However, I had a lovely Christmas dinner with friends and although missing family and friends it was a unique experience.