Well, time for the next bit of news.... Alex has had an enormous afternoon in the surf. And I mean huge! We headed out to Punta de Lobos, a very famous and revered break near Pichilemu, on the coast of Chile, where we have spent the last 3 days. Punta de Lobos is know for it´s big waves, and long left handers, and today didn´t disappoint, although the mist had blown in so it was a little difficult to see. With a couple of days of surfing the freezing waters under his belt (6 surfs in the last 3 days), Alex headed out with an Aussie and a Kiwi, who lead the way between the enormous rocks where they had to paddle along a channel, hoping the big waves wouldn´t buffet them into the sides. I breathed a sigh of relief when they came out the other side (although I´m not sure why as the waves on the other side were huge!). In a few hours he managed to surf his longest wave ever, as well as narrowly avoiding a head on collision with an enormous sea lion that was coming out of a wave. I think they were both very relieved! Although I couldn´t hear a thing over the pounding of water, I could imagine the ¨yahooing¨that Alex was doing after each amazing wave! He´s a very tired boy now!

I´ve spent the last couple of days here relaxing, reading my book in the comfy deck chairs out on the deck of the restaurant that is part of our ¨hostel¨. It´s a very posh version of a hostel, and we´re not quite comfortable with just hanging out in the restaurant which serves as the communal area, but it´s really nice. I also managed to do a couple of Spanish classes at the Pichilemu Institute of Language Studies, run by some lovely Americans who have been very helpful and friendly, and I have learnt a lot in the last couple of days! I would recommend the school to anyone who wants to learn Spanish in Chile. It´s a lovely place to hang out! If we didn´t have plans the two of us would happily spend more time here following our respective pursuits.

Last night we lazed in hot salt water baths (baños caliente del Mar) on the deck out the front. We spent an hour staring at the stars and I saw THREE shooting stars! That´s more than I´ve seen in my whole life so far! It was lovely. There may even be some bad photos that don´t do it justice...

Since our last post there have been a few other events. Fi, Alex and I spent a lovely 5 days in Viña del Mar and Valparaiso with Peter and Angelica where we seemed to eat a lot, drink a lot of vino blanco and pisco sours, and spents our days exploring the two towns. Viña, the smaller of the two, was home to many markets that caught Fi´s eye, and we spent many hours wandering around there trying to fulfill her shopping urges! Valparaiso had a lot of character and we enjoyed a couple of days wandering around the streets with our cameras at the ready, hoping to capture some good shots of the quaint colourful buildings and ascensors (the funiculars that go up the steep hills to save peoples knees from climbing). We also had a few drives up and down the coast (we´re not quite used to the roads in Chile yet) and on our last day visited an ex-whaling town further down the coast that was very cute. Whilst in Viña we also celebrated Angelica´s birthday, and the three of us went shopping for chocolate cake. Given our lack of Spanish we came back with a cake that looked like it was chocolate on the outside, but was more like butter cake on the inside but had dulce de leche swirled through it, so we weren´t too disappointed! Mmm, dulce de leche.

Given our love of dulce de leche, another task for the week was to find dulce de leche for Fi to take home. We think 1kg will be enough!

And then Fi was gone. 4 weeks flew by so quickly! Luckily there were no arguments and we all got on really well. I was sure she´d be sick of me (or us) by the end of the first week, but it all worked amazingly! And so now we don´t have any gossip to entertain us, and she´s at home taunting me with reading the next book in the Twilight series. Hmm.

Tomorrow we´re heading back to Santiago to start our tour. I think it´s going to be a busy 55 days!

Will write more soon.