Hi everyone! We've been in Santiago for 5 days now, currently in Barrio Brasil- the student part, and before that we stayed in Bellavista, more touristy. The flight out here took about 13 hours and we ended up waiting 8 hours in Madrid for our connecting flight, we were all so nackered fell asleep before take off!! It was pissing it down when we arrived but luckily its not rained since. It's been sunny during the day but freeeezing at night, I'm hoping to invest in a peruvian jumper to keep me warm on the Inca Trail! Everyone at the hostels has been really friendly and on the first night we went to a club called 53 degrees with some brazilians who told us all about Rio. Anyone outside of South America they call gringos and apparently me and Rick look like the biggest tourists...I could pass for a brazilian surely?!

We ventured into the centre of Santiago yesterday (we thought we'd achieved this on Sunday but being unaware of how big Santiago is, we were actually miles off and you need to get the metro to the centre haha). We've been to the top of Cerro San Cristoban, and because it had rained the day before the view was really clear and you could see the snowy andes behind Santiago which was awesome!

On monday we went to Valparaiso, where we were welcomed with men walking around with dead cows on their head (really)! There was so much smog that we could only see about 10 meters off the pacific ocean, and we were also befriended by a stray dog (we called the little chap Rabies Rex) who followed us about 2 miles down the road! We eventually found somewhere nice for lunch and ordered paella but instead we got a fish broth with what looked like the entire contents of the pacific, made a nice change from bread though!

Anyway I'm about to go and defeat Rick at table tennis, but I will update this again as soon as I can. We fly to Peru tomorrow where we start our 45 day tour, we've got to get up at 4am- lets hope we don't pull off a Paul!!!

Miss you all lots! xx

By the way, I've just uploaded some photos but the pictures aren't coming up on this screen so I can't write a caption for each one- most are pretty self-explanatory though!