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Greetings Christmas Shoppers,
While most of you are probably braving the windswept highstreet to start that all important chrimbo shopping (only 23 days left folks) Dan and I are currently sweltering in the supposedly most arid place on earth, yes we're in the desert, the Atacama desert to be more precise.
For those of you, who like my dear dad, are asking 'why on earth have you gone there?', I'll tell you. Well apart from it being in the way of our route to Peru, it's also a pretty amazing place and while indeed it does seem like the a**e end of the world, we've never seen a landscape like it. In places literally nothing grows or lives here. It's bizarre and I guess it's a little what it might be like on Mars or the Moon. So I guess we won't need to go there now.
The oasis town of San Pedro is where we've been staying though I can't say I've seen a whole lot of the surrounding area as in true sod's law fashion I have been stricken down with a bad head cold (in the desert?!) so have spent the past day and a half in bed while Danny has had to entertain himself on a solo tour of the surrounding area.
So seeing as I can't really fill you in much on the salt plains and flamingoes that Dan saw yesterday (frankly it'd only bore you stupid) I'll update you on what else we've been up to lately.
We started our Chilean adventure in Santiago, which to be honest was a bit of a dissappointment. It's just your average city complete with big non descript buildings and plenty of traffic. However, our hostel was pretty fun and it made amends when we took part in the weekly trivia night and won it!! Get in. I think it was due largely to some lucky guesses and thick fellow travellers on opposing teams. Anyway Dan and I felt pretty chuffed with ourselves and our prize of Chilean wine.
As you may have also read from Dan's recent message, we also stuffed our faces with the local delicacy of 'el Completo' which turned out to be a hotdog smothered with the most amount of mayonnaise I have EVER seen. I apparently took Danny by mild surprise by eating mine (thought I did scrape as much of the mayo off as I could). But Dan managed to wolf his down pretty easily. Suffice to say we haven't had another since and have been eating as much salad as possible to counter the heart stopping effects.
You'll see from photos (that we'll put on soon I promise) that we also went to the Iguazu Falls on the border between Brazil and Argentina. Again, a spectacular sight though once we'd had a thorough soaking on our boat ride under the falls there wasn't much left for us to do. So we headed back to chill out by the massive pool at our hostel, which for a nice change seemed more like a plush holiday resort than a grimy backpacker inn.
They even laid on evening entertainment which we certainly weren't prepared for. Especially when Mr Samba man grabbed me and made me shake my tushy in front of everybody for their amusement. Not to be outshone, Danny boy also got 'volunteered' for some Samba fun but it seemed more like Butlins to him. If that wasn't enough we almost choked on our barbequed steak when we got 'entertained' by some skimpily clad Brazilian 'dancers' complete with tassles and ridiculous headfeathers!
We're over it now anyway and trying to cram in as much as we can into our remaining couple of weeks before that dreaded Lima-Madrid-London-Manchester flight home, arghhhh!
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