Not quite a silent unseen bullet from an Algerian mountain top but that’s kind of what went through my mind as the window next to me disappeared and shards of glass filled my lap as we entered Santiago de Chile. Fortunately I wasn’t Brad Pit and Kate Winslet hadn’t just been shot and we weren’t in the film Babel. We were bombing along the motor way, the bus window had just disappeared like you see airplane windows disappear on the movies though and I was covered in nasty sharp glass. It was all quite dramatic.
It was kids and rocks taking pot shots at the tourists and the bus wasn’t stopping for anyone.
Apart from that, getting to Santiago was easy.
2 seconds is pretty much all the time we spent here, the eventful bus from the Argentinian border took us straight to Santiago de Chile and a taxi took us straight from the bus station to the hostel where we went straight out to dinner to find that Chile is indeed the most expensive country in South America. So I can say for sure that the inside of the hostel was very nice, the walk along the river was nice too, the post office queues were very long, the pizza was amazing and it’s easy to get to the airport at 5am (after you wake up the taxi driver). Santiago was lovely though. Like Argentina, for better or worse, in places you could easily mistake it for some of the trendiest or swankiest places in London.
OK, I’m a massive James Bond fan, and as such, should most definitely have seen the new James Bond film some considerable time ago!
I was in Bolivia when it came out and closest they could get was Kung Foo Panda. Not bad I guess but I’d already watched it on the plane over! So the long and the short of it is, I’ve still not found anywhere to see it. Constantly on the lookout, Kath achieved something amazing and actually smelt out a cinema in Tahiti. The wafts of popcorn giving it away long before we could see it! All that could supply was Transporter 3 or something equally DVD!
Help!!!
14th of December and 3 months 4 days into the trip, the last few weeks have been pretty hectic. Our first change of plans and we managed to add a whole extra country to our itinerary. Instead of bussing all the way back from the bottom of Bolivia to La Paz to fly to Santiago in Chile we did a short hop over the border from Tupiza in Bolivia to Argentina. It also meant we could stay with our traveling buddy Tam a few more days and eventually get some much needed chillout time by the pool.
So in the last few weeks we’ve bussed down from Tupiza in Bolivia to Santiago in Chile via Salta and Mendoza in Argentina and then from Santiago we flew to Easter Island for five days and I’m now writing this from Tahiti. Tomorrow we fly to Rarotonga in the Cook Islands and a few hours later to Aitutaki where we’re going to spend Christmas . We’ve got a whole ten days there which will be such a great break. After that we’re back to Rarotonga for a New Years Eve knees up. Can’t wait!
Not sure what wireless access will be like there but got loads of things to post.
OK, finally got somewhere with this. 3 months (and what it tells me is 31,758.6 miles along!) and I’ve finally found a way to display all the masses of GPS data I’ve been collecting. I’d originally been trying Google maps without any luck but I just found EveryTrail.com and this (somehow) manages to crunch the data and display it (using Google Maps of course). Still looking to see what this site can do, but to see my trip so far check out http://www.everytrail.com/view_trip.php?trip_id=87796
It claims you can add a map to a blog but no luck with that so far! WordPress (my blog software) is very good but it really hates external tinkering!
Here’s one I screen scaped..
Apparently my average speed has been 15.9mph and I’ve gone 14km up and 14km down which is good as we started in Brighton and we’re near sea level now!
