Chile isn’t actually cold.
There’s not a great deal to report with regards to the past few days. The highlight, for me at least is that I´m feeling rather healthy again. I have no excuse really as I have done literally bugger all for the past week other then sit around reading about captain Cook or sit on the truck for long drive days listening to music.
We were in a big Argentine town at the weekend, Mendoza and several of us were ready for a big night of disco dancing but it didn’t quite materialize. Argentina very much does it´s own thing which I assume they adopted from the Spanish. I´m largely talking about their love for siestas. The whole country pretty much shuts down between 1pm and 5pm every day so they can go for a snooze. You could think that this is lazy but at 5pm they go back to work for a few hours, I then assume they go home for a shower, watch East Enders and then head out for dinner around 10pm. If you want to go to a restaurant for dinner then don´t even attempt it till at least 9pm which for us has been a bit difficult to get used to. When you get to dinner and especially if you order meat, a cow will turn up on your plate. Therefore by 11pm you are tired and unable to move because of excessive cow intake. On a week night we would retire to bed but at the weekend we want to go disco dancing. We spent Saturday night going from bar to bar trying to find somewhere busy, we gave up at 2.30am! The streets were rammed with people all sitting outside eating, drinking and talking. Whole families were eating at midnight, plates of food were still being brought out at 1.30am, no one was dancing. At the time I was disgusted with such behavior but looking back it was a rather nice scene. Go out, chill out on the street on a warm summers evening pigging your face and drinking cold beer. To me that sounds like much less effort than dancing. On our way back to the campsite we passed loads of people having BBQs on the side of the road or on roundabouts at 2.30am, good for them. Everything we have heard states that no night club gets busy till 2 or 3am so we´ll will just have to have another go some other time.
One of the highlights of this tour has been the bush camping. We have stayed in some beautiful places largely surrounded by the Andes which offer an awesome backdrop. We passed over into Chile on Monday and the scenery was breathtaking and as we descended down towards Santiago everything greened up which was a nice thing to see as the mountains have offered little colour. Chile is a bit more ‘normal’ in the sense that they eat at normal o’clock, don’t want to kill the British and go disco dancing before I want to go to bed, not after. The helpings of food are still generous though. Last night I had a whole Sunday roast in a bun smothered in cheese which was very satisfying especially when washed down with a lovely brew called Kuntsmann (no joke) which takes on more of a homely English bitter taste. The British lads liked it, the Aussies didn´t which probably sums it up best.
One week till Christmas, lots of exciting stuff on the horizon leading up to Santas one day of work. I hope to have more blogs about exciting stuff and less about me me me. Addios.
Trig Tales 