Linda hurt her good knee last night, so Rob was going to take her to the medical centre this morning, which meant that only four of us hit Valparaiso. During the night, around 1am, the in cabin tannoy woke me up. There had been a fire on deck 4. I'm still not sure why we were woken up.

The city is built on 46 hills and is full of windy, narrow, two way streets. In the cruise terminal, we hired a cab for two hours. He took us round the back streets of Valparaiso where the tour buses wouldn't be able to go. The houses just cling on to the side of the hills. It's an amazing sight. Many of them are in need of a little TLC. We saw the oldest church in the city. We also saw some of the coloured steps the place is famous for. Many of the inhabitants use funiculars to travel up and down the hills, the one we rode was, as Yvonne said, like a garden shed on wheels.

After that we went to Vina del Mar a seaside resort about 5km from Valparaiso. This is a pleasant little place and I'd have liked to have spent more time there. Outside the local museum there is a Moai, or head from Easter Island.

We then went back to Valparaiso and a local department store and supermarket, where I bought a shirt and then, while Phil and Yvonne were playing around on wifi, Barbara and I had lunch. We wanted a pisco sour, but couldn't find a bar, which is amazing considering it's a port area. What we did find was a fruit and vegetable market.

I was pleasantly surprised by Valparaiso, and thoroughly enjoyed my day here. The BBC said the temperature would be about 30 but it was less than that. When I was watching the speed that they were loading the container ship next door it was quite warm, but the breeze had quite an edge to it.

While I was having my 'back onboard cuppa' in the Lido cafe I saw Eric Knowles the TV antiques guy and his wife. He's certainly not tomorrow's speaker, as she's someone I've never heard of!

The mad, bad old lady has definitely been disembarked. Apparently, she had a four hour talk with the ship's doctor, who declared her sane. A nurse was sent from the UK and I guess they're in the air as we speak!

We won bottle number 15 in the pub quiz, but were a couple of points adrift in the Syndicate. The ship left about three hours late, but I never caught what the captain said when he gave us the reason why. Still, we have 10 sea days to catch up the lost time!