Hola! (that´s about as far as our spanish goes, so dont get excited!)

Happy New Year to everyone. Hope you all had a great christmas time and you´re not too disappointed about getting back to the real world. Here is our first update from Chile, hope you like:

We arrived at Santiago after flying back through time (thanks to the time difference, we got to Chile a few hours before we left Auckland-weird!). Unfortunately, this resulted in major jet-lag and so the first few days were a bit of a write off. Due to us being lazy and not wanting to travel around christmas we had 8 nights in Santiago so we could afford to stay in bed and recover for a while. We found Santiago to be a really nice city, not affluent in some areas but lots of character everywhere.We spent our days wandering around town and being lazy at the hostel, which was a really nice relaxing place in a cool neighbourhood full of old classical buildings and amazing artistic graffiti! Getting the cable car up to the hill (Cerro san Christobal) behind our hostel gave us great views of the city and displays and impressive statue of the Virgin Mary. In the city The Plaza de Armas was a great place to walk around and see all of the quality artists parading their paintings, amazingly beautiful old buildings and a stunning cathedral. We also went to a museum (free on sundays) to view the pre-colonial art and watched some diplomatic arrivals outside the Presidential Palace whilst being the centre of attention for a class of chilean kids whose English extended to football players (Frank Lampard) and ´Thankyou´. All in all we had a really great first week in Chile, making friends in our lovely hostel, enjoying the hectic hustle and bustle of cheap boutiques and markets a few blocks away and admiring the great contrasts of new and old in the city centre.

Reluctantly, we left our hostel on Christmas Eve for our 4star hotel, still in Santiago (which we had booked months ago as a christmas treat). As many of you might already know (as i´ve moaned a lot about it) christmas day was a pretty uneventful day. The hotel restaurant was closed (only providing sandwiches on christmas eve) and we had to resort to watching tv, eating snack food and drinking wine for 2 days. At least it will be one to remember!

Next we took the 2 hour bus ride just north of Santiago to the lovely beach town of Viña del Mar. Here our guest house was a beautiful old building (needed abit of renovation but had lots of character) set into the hills over-looking the town. We had a nice few days here enjoying the company of very friendly landlord and relaxing walks around the town and along the beach. One day we attempted to top up our tans (after them fading from new zealand) and Steve had his bag stolen from right between our feet. Unfortunately, we had left our money and valuables at the guest house but steve was very disappointed to lose his Godfather t-shirt bought from Bangkok and had to walk home wrapped in his towel. Unfortunately, the keys to the hostel were also stolen and so we were locked out for a while until the next door neighbour came to our rescue!

Next we got the short metro ride to the town of Valparaiso for new years eve. The hostel here is a bit of dive, again set in an old building but not clean at all!! New Year´s (año nuevo) is quite famous here and we definately see why. we first met our friend scott (a kiwi we met in santiago)at his hostel and we went out to the street with his hostel friends and hundreds of people, up to the hills to count down and watch the amazing fireworks across the harbour! Next we went down to the streets in the dark (they turn off the street lamps for the fireworks) to party with the thousands of people dancing in the roads. Next we wandered around (still following scott and his friends) and found a massive outdoor concert in one of the squares! Here scott randomly found our other friend hannah (also who we met in santiago) and we were soon adopted by a bunch of chilean teenagers who tried to feed us beer and took us to a club! We finally got home at 7 even though there was hundreds of people still wandering the streets. Our last few days here have been taken up with recovering from new years eve, going out to eat in a quaint restaurant with old chilean singers with hannah and her boyfriend Ben, watching Avatar at the cinema and moseying around town. We´ve had an amazing time here for new years but will be looking forward to moving on tomorrow as the town is quite grotty and intimidating and not as nice as Viña.

Thats it for now. Hopefully the crappy hostel computer will let us upload some photos too. Hope all is well and we look forward again to hearing any news from home.

Love and miss you all

Katie and steve xxxx