Sealions!

Another late start, we had bacon butties for breakfast :) with the bacon left over from our carbonara the night before and was delicious, even more so as we'd traipsed all over the place trying to find some and ended up with some in a packet, a delicacy it seems as there isnt any to be found anywhere, even in the butchers! After breakfast and the usual internet session we went out to explore the other end of town which led us once again to the sea front via a pedestrian railway crossing, with barriers everyone ignored. A short walk beside a highly graffitied roadway and under a bridge where a few market stalls were set up and we were walking beside the sea which was, despite the litter near the shore of rocks, averagely clean but of an almost tropical green. We walked out onto a large 2 tiered, wooden pier and right at the end of the top deck found ourselves enjoying a fantastic view of the whole bay and the crescent of hills behind. We stayed here a while admiring the view and looking out to an outcrop of some man-made structure which must surely have been attached to land at one time but is now home to a colony of sea lions who use it as a refuge to sleep and sunbathe about 20m from the shore. From our vantage point we could also see a cheeky few who had decided the deck of a small fishing boat was also fair game and watched at their attempts to jump up over the rails onto it, sometimes failing and falling back into the sea with a huge splash yet a lot of the time succeeding using their incredible strength to hurl themselves fully out of the water and their flippers to pull themselves aboard!! We decided to get a closer look at the main colony and to head back to shore opposite to their refuge but before doing so we had a look at the lower level of the pier which houses a glass sided bar/restaurant with a beautiful wooden floor that we thought would make a fantastic venue for a salsa party!! We found ourselves joining a lot of locals opposite the sealion colony who clearly come to enjoy the spectacle on their days off (this being a sunny Sunday afternoon) the same as we would back home. Wildlife is fascinating to watch, no matter how many times you see it there is something special about watching creatures whose lives we dont rule living quite happily without our interference! Eventually deciding that we should go and buy some food for dinner as we didnt know what time the shops closed on Sundays, we dragged ourselves away from the quarrelling colony (they seemed to enjoy jostling for the best position and pushing each other off of their rock into the sea, much to everybody's amusement on shore) and headed into town where we found the remainder of a fruit and veg market, a flea market and also an antiques market! All 3 in different places with their own kind of atmosphere as you'd expect from the goods and type of people who would frequent them. The fruit & veg one was under cover of a building similar to how we found the Mercado Central in Santiago yet not so grand, the flea market was on a narrow winding street between houses on cobbled roads and the antiques market was under delicate, wrought iron, victorian looking shelters along the edge of one of the large, beautiful parks in the city. We wandered through them all before completing our shopping and heading back to the hostel to make a dinner of 'risotto', we only had $2 to buy dinner and breakfast fro the morning so rice, a loaf of bread, garlic and an onion was all we could afford! After dinner, which was actually very tasty, we found a couple of films to watch on the internet which were substantially longer than we'd thought meaning we still didnt get to bed until gone 4am!!