Up early again! We went on a full day tour today of the Torres del Paine national park. This started with the cave of Megadon. This is an enormous cave caused by the sea eroding the rocks before the sea levels dropped millions of years ago. Archaeologists have discovered remains of dinosaurs and early mammals such as Sabre tooth tigers in this area. The sun was out and the wind was strong, a force 9 for those sailors (45-50 miles an hour) which made walking to th...

Good news our luggage also caught the plane. We flew to Punta Arenas which is as far south as we go. The Torres de Paine are 250 miles north of the airport. The land was very flat at first and reminded us of the lowlands of Scotland. As we drove further north along the road called "the route to the end of the world" it became more mountainous until we reached Puerto Natales, where we are staying tonight. The small town is on a sea loch about 25 miles from the Pac...

When we arrived at Puerto Vargas there were forest fires burning with smoke drifting everywhere. Yesterday the smoke intensified and it was so bad we had to shut the windows in our hotel room to keep it out. This morning we set off for the airport as planned but the smoke was thicker. On the motorway we crawled along to the toll only to find the junction to the airport closed so our driver was forced to go via Ponte Mott, this was ok until we ground to a halt aga...

Today we had a mystery tour called Romahue. We were given no info about it and were vaguely expecting to see the lakes and possibly a museum. The driver who picked us up spoke no English and so we were none the wiser. Romahue is a farm where the owners are trying to support the local ecology. http://romahue.cl/en/ Initially we went on a trek through virgin forest which had not been cultivated in anyway. Much of the forest is on top of the river and so the trees...

A new drink but will it catch on? As you know, the English like their tea with milk and Sue is very particular in this respect. Many places in Chile do not have milk so we have black tea. At Santiago airport whilst changing planes Sue thought she had cracked it when she saw tea with milk on the menu. This duly arrived and turned out to be hot frothy milk with a tea bag, a sort of teapachino! It tasted as bad as it sounds.