2,000km in 5 days

After a couple of Piscos to steady the nerves, I checked my bank balance.

As soon as the account flashed up, I wished I hadn´t.  In two days I will have been away for exactly 1 month.  I have already spent about 40% of the money I brought with me....

In an effort to combat this issue I´ve been taking night buses everywhere.  I have spent 3 of the last 5 nights on a bus, saving me approximately 40 pounds.  That is about 1 night of drinking in Mendoza, so I still have a way to go.  During those three nights I have had a total of 6 hours of sleep, witnessed the loudest snoring ever recorded on a moving vehicle, been left holding a 3-month old baby while her parents had a 20-minute argument, and watched ´The Break Up´ in Spanish.  I can´t really recommend any of those activities.  I´m now so sleep deprived that I look like a serial killer.

It´s been a great few days though!  I´ve moved 2,000km North, spent a sun-drenched day in Santiago and visited the beach town of La Serena.

In Santiago, I caught up with some friends from the hostel, visited a rooftop pool and danced the traditional Cueca dance.  "The idea is to seduce your partner by looking passionately into their eyes....while mimicking the footsteps of a male chicken", my Chilean friend explained.  Very well then!

I must admit, when the locals danced, it looked great.  But I was rubbish.  I think we left just early enough that I wasn´t attacked for making a mockery of hundreds of years of traditional dance.  By then it was time for me to get on the next night bus.

I arrived the next day in La Serena at 6am.  It is a lovely little town next to a long curving beach.  There are lots of churches, museums and markets to explore by day and the region is famed for its clear night skies. This has resulted in the construction of many observatories, taking advantage of, on average, 350 clear night skies per year.  Remember that fact, 350 clear night skies per year, its important later.

My bed wasn´t ready so I visited a small museum about Gabriel Gonzalez Videla, who helped draft the current Chilean constitution.  It had some decent paintings and was all very interesting but I was so tired that when I sat down to take a rest I fell asleep for 30 minutes and was woken up by an amused cleaning lady.

The rest of the day was spent chilling out on the beach with some people from the hostel and the evening largely involved drinking games from around the world.  And Extreme Jenga - like regular Jenga but with drinking rules.

The next day a group of us decided to go to the observatory and see some stars up close!  It was a beautiful day, with clear skies and scorching hot sun, so I rented a board and went surfing.  It was great to get back amongst the waves as we don´t get much surf in London....

That night was stargazing night.  Nine of us jumped on the bus for the 45 minute journey to Mamalluca observatory in the Elqui Valley.  You can probably guess what happened - just as we were about to get there we were told some clouds were rolling in and that it would be too cloudy to see anything!  What are the odds?!  Anyway, all was not lost, we still had a great night swapping stories from our travels in the hostel bar...

I´d been befriended by two Chilean girls who were on their holidays and a guy from Germany.  We visited some beautiful Japanese gardens in the morning.  This would have been the perfect place to get over my hangover, except there was a Mexican circus in town.  It had pitched up right next to the gardens, much to the owner´s annoyance, and blasted messages out over the tannoy informing the masses of their famous jumping giraffes and dancing squirrels.

I jumped on another night bus that evening and did the 16 hours to San Pedro, where I am writing this post.  The landscape was fantastic travelling over.  I´ve never seen such huge, dry, rocky expanses in my life.

There are lots of things to do, so we´ll see what my new budget can stretch to.  Oh, continuing the theme of my ridiculous luck, this is the driest desert in the world and there are currently floods!!  It is so bad that some of the roads have been washed away.  This is the for the first time they have had rain like this in 11 years!  Anyway, it looks like I will still be able to visit most things though, so it should be OK.

For now I will leave you with a picture of me celebrating pancake day in Santiago!