Our peacful sleep was rudely interrupted every 15 minutes on Wednesday night by some bloke in our room making frequent and noisey trips to the loo. He managed to puke not only on the floor by our bunk but all over himself too! Nice. Cherise and Nat have officially been re-christened as Gnomie and Smurfy 'cos Cherise is about 4 foot nothing, and Nat has this blue head towel that makes her look like Papa Smurf (and yes i do know that Smurfs are blue with white head towels, but try to think outside the box people!). On Thursday morning we went white water rafting with Cherise, Lucy didn't come because she wasn't very well. We were taken up a mountain in a mini bus with about 7 other people to the Rios Andinos rafting centre. Our giude Mono (that means Monkey for the none spanglish speakers) took us into a big shed where he started handing out our rafting gear. This consists of a very fetching life jacket, paddle, helmet and a plastic top and pair of kecks that look like the Michael Jackass outfit from Bo Selecta! He showed us how to paddle etc and told us a few commands and then we were ready to go. While we were getting the boat ready Mono, genius that he is, said that if we didn't want to get our shoes soaked we should take them off. Gnomie thought it was a good idea and went to put hers back in the van - somehow she managed to rip the door off the minibus, noone's quite sure how she did it but we susspect its some ancient Gnome magic which gives her super human strength! Anyway we all piled in the boat with Mono at the back shouting the orders and Gnomie sitting in the middle cos there was an odd number of rowers. She swapped with Smurfy half way through 'cos they both had trouble reaching the water! After about 30mins of us rowing we stopped for a break and a 'small walk' to a little waterfall. The small walk was over some boulders and sharp stones so those without shoes, or without hiking boots for that matter, didn't do very well. Good job the genius guide knows his stuff hey!? On the second half of the trip, Gnomie nearly got lashed out of the boat a couple of time and the guide made nat stand at the front and be our mascot - v funny! Becky managed to rip a hole in her very fetching kecks - in the arse part, nice! That night to save a bit of cash we decided to cook for ourselves! We bought steak (cos its unbelievably cheap over here) and some potatoes and veg. We noticed a couple of other people from our hostel buying food in the supermarket too, so we Top Shop elbowed our way to the queue and legged it home so we could use the kitchen first. Unfortuantely, the fact that we were in the teeny tiny kitchen preparing our food didn't really bother the 10 thousand size a million blokes who then crammed in there with us and robbed the only hobs that were working! To cut a long story short (and it is a long story, with a lot of irate midgets - actually a bit like Lord of the Rings but with more threatening behaviour from the little people) after robbing all the hobs so we couldnt cook, we ended up with our big pan of spuds on the smallest ring (hob ring that is, not ring of power). Then we had to mash them while Nat cooked 4 steaks in the smallest pan ever and then had to cook our 3 veg on one ring in metal cups cos there were no clean pans left. To top it all off, one of the blokes who raided the kitchen then stood over Smurfy telling her how she should cook the meat - we managed to stop her smacking him with the frying pan, but only 'cos it never had a handle and she couldn't get a good grip!. We actually ended up eating about 3 hours later at 11pm - was very nice though considering! The next day was spent mainly mincing around and waiting for our bus to Buenos Aires. We even managed to get over ourselves and make friends with the bloke from the kitchen who thinks he's some relation to Delia. We created tuna pasta for lunch and had a thouroughly good day watching tv.