Hello Good People!

How remiss we have been not to write anything for almost a month! Our sincere apologies but in our defence we have been pretty busy. Since the last entry we have been revising very hard which sounds like hard work but when revision is going kayaking on a beautiful stretch of great fun white water it becomes considerably easier to bear (is that the right kind of bear, i don´t know, it doesn´t really matter) The other half of our revision has been a little harder but still not all that strenuous- we have been trying to learn spanish, with varying degrees of success! We not only need to be able to speak day to day but also be able to talk to clients and give a safety talk in spanish when we take our safety kayak test, which is in 5 days time!! Aaarrggh!!

Apart from all this extremely hard work we have also been playing pretty hard too. We have climbed Volcan Villarica (thats a volcano by the way!! an active volcano!!!) we have been swimming in a beautiful clear - COLD - lake called lago caburgua, we have paddled a couple of awesome waterfall runs and we have been horse riding up and down mountains- my first time on a horse i might add. Photo´s of most of this should now be on photobucket.com/daveandfrannie.

We have also now moved into the house where (fingers crossed) we´ll be staying for the next four months. It is a very spacious house with a large garden, swimming pool and numerous cherry, lemon and we think fig trees. Hence we have been gorging ourselves on cherries and having lemon on everthing and suffering the consequences - did you know cherries have very similar qualities to prunes, if you know what i mean? i do now! We are the only ones in the house at the moment but it is supposed to be opening up to regular customers soon. We initially moved into double rooms each with their own en-suite, but unfortunately this luxury wasn´t to last and we now have the upstairs of the house to share between the six of us and the lady who has become our surrogate mother out here. She is a lovely lady called Coni who makes our lunch and dinner and refuses any help we try and give her! The four other guys have a large room to share whilst Fran and i have a small cupboard to ourselves. Its not exactly spacious but it does at least give us some privacy, and we are sleeping in real sheets at last after a month in sleeping bags!

Ok. thats about all the news i have for the moment. We shall write again when we have more to tell.

Ciao for now.

Dave