Hello all, and lo siento mucho for the lateness of this blog, The last few weeks have been extremely busy. Anyway i best get thinking and go into a Wayne´s World style flashbck to our arrival in Santiago dodododo....dodododo......

After a pretty uneventful 12 hour journey from Bariloche we arrived in Santiago already finding the at the Chilean people were very friendly and that the Chilean empañadas were very big (more on big food later). We arrived in Santiago with skiing on the brain so we prebooked one night in a hostel and booked to travel up to the mountains for ski/apre ski for 4 days before returning to the capital. The sensible thing to do therefore would be to get early to bed before catching our bus at 7.30am, a plan which Mark and Andy would see through with aplomb.

After arriving at the bus station we decided that it would be easiest to just catch a cab to the hostel so in we got and told the driver the address, the wrong address!!! We set off on a course for something called the Hotel (rather than hostel) Forestal in some dodgy back end of town. After the confusion was cleared up with the help of our extremely friendly driver we got to the hostal via the underground during rushour, and were excited to see that there was a barbeque night on, (easy, barbeque, few drinks and bed). We met an English guy called jason, from the photos, who would travel with us for a few days. The barbeque went well and me and Jason thought that it couldn´t harm to hit a few bars/clubs with our fellow hostellers, a few wines/beers/vodkas/tequillas/women later we rolled int the hostel at 6.30am an hour before our bus to the mountain was to leave!!!!

The bus ride up to the Andean town of Farrelones near the 3 Valleys ski resorts went suprisingly well, Andy and Mark gave me and Jason A fair bit of stick for staying out all night but we were feeling surprisingly chipper!!! We got to our new hostal and were served a hearty breakfast and then we set immediately off for the slopes, where upon things took a turn for the worse!! After deciding (stupidly) to try snowboarding, it was time to negotiate the first challenge of the day, the drag lifts. Jason (an experienced snowboarder) and Andy (on skis) zoomed up, Mark and I consistently fell and ended up walking half the distance. It was at this point that my hangover kicked in properly and i spent the rest of the morning lying on a bench and making pretty orange patterns in the snow with vomit. In the same morning Mark broke one of the drag lifts, and nearly himself!!! The next few days consisted of some skiing, some dvd watching and some more skiing and a wrist injury for me, followed by some crazy apre ski at la montana bar farrelones including some Pisco (Chile´s local drop), see photos for more detail. We then set off on our return to Santiago!!! The journey down was fast and furious, Andy and mark enjoyed it fine, but i was suffering from A.M.S (acute mountain sickness) I´ll let andy take over from here for a minute :