Today has been mostly about picking up the truck that we will be using for the rest of the holiday. After breakfast Victor ran us to the airport where we had elected to collect the car. We did this because we didn't fancy driving through central Santiago. However when we got to the airport, there wasn't a counter for Chilean Rent-A-Car and the information woman told us to go to arrivals. There we saw a man brandishing a sign with our names. He explained he would ...

We are staying in a house owned by Victor Ibarra in the outskirts of Santiago. We appear to be the only overnight guests and therefore were invited to eat in the kitchen. This being Chile, there was a jar of Nescafe on the table with a Thermos of hot water, but was asked for hot milk instead. Breakfast was scrambled eggs served in the pan, bread, cheese and jams. On the TV was the Chilean version of Loose Women and they seemed to be discussing how hard it is to b...

It is 10.03 pm and we are sat in the garden of our hotel drinking a very fine bottle of Carmenere by our garden room and the pool. In all our journey to Chile was uneventful. A bit of Hurry Up and Wait but in all mainly unproblematic. We arrived in good time at Heathrow and ate dinner at one of the concessions: Mushroom and leek pie with chips, peas and gravy (but we didn't find any leek but lots of asparagus...not a bad thing!) Can we have our normal moan about ...

We checked out of our hotel and caught the train back to Shinjuku Station. Once there we enquired about the left luggage office. All Japanese stations seem to have left luggage lockers but most of these were too small for our huge suitcases. The lass in the Information Office suggested that the Department store, Odakyu, had larger lockers and gave us rough directions. Main Japanese railway stations can be like a labyrinth andpossibly Shinjuku is the most complex....

Friday. Checked out of our hotel in Matsumoto and headed back up the motorway to Nagono to return the car. After being dropped of at the station, we had a "morning set" at a cafe and caught the Shinkansen train to Tokyo. We transfered onto a normal JR line to Shin Okubo. The train was crowded and we felt a bit conspicuous with our large cases. Turning out on to a busy street, we managed to negotiate the complex area and building numbering system to find our hotel...