Yes, yes, yes! After a 24hr flight from Auckland, NZ, via Los Angeles and Lima I made it to Chile! My third (and last?!!) continent. So let`s wave our hand to Australia & New Zealand (I had a truely fabulous time!) and welcome Latin America!

Still pretty jet-legged I`m sitting behind the computer - when coming into the city this morning I was sure that all hostels would be empty but what do you know, they were not. So there goes the first practing of spanish by calling up a whole load of hostels to find the one that has room. The one I`m now in is actually quit nice. After a 4 hr sleep I couldn`t resist going into the city. It`s really great to hear, feal and see all the Latin influences again. The music in the shops and in the streets, the busy & buzzing humm of the city and the people. All my spanish is coming back really fast, although the accent here is very different again from the places I have been. So far Santiago looks like a beautifull city, surrounded by high (still snowpeaked) hilltops.

Sunday I´ll pick up my mom, dad, brother, sister & my brothers girlfriend Kristianne. Tonight Cathy is arriving. We`ll all make it over to Argentina pretty soon. The plan is to first see the south of Argentina, Pategonia, before coming back to Chile. For now, hasta luago - nos vemos pronto! Floris

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Back in Santiago de Chile; what do you know. These have been some busy weeks travelling around Argentina. It was great to see some familiar faces again when my mom, dad, my sister and my brother and his girlfriend came by. Yesterday the last of them flew back home to Holland. And yes, yes, Floris is still in South America, going strong. I was supposed to fly to La Paz yesterday but what do you know.. cancelled the flight and decided to go up through the -supposedly- beautifull north of Chile. Atacama desert, the Valley of the Moon etc. We´ll take about 10 days to get all the way to the north of the country, where we´ll catch the famous bustrain which will take us to La Paz. This obviously is a lot better way to travel to Bolivia then just taking the plane.

Valparaiso & Viña del Mar
These two old port town at the coast of Chile is what we visited with my family two days ago, just before they left. A lot of Valparaiso is "vergane glorie" as we say in dutch. It was still a nice place to visit. Viña del mar is what I like to call the "Benidorm" of Chile. A quick in and out was all the visit this place merited. I´m sure the north is going to be a lot better. So yes let´s wait for new about these places and keep checking the site. Cheers, Floris

Before making it to the desert town of San Pedro de Atacama in the North of Chili we shortly stopped off in La Serena, 9 hours north of Santiago. It's a pretty little town were we went up to one of the Observatories part of the Cerro Toloto Observatory. We got all explained about the stars, before we actually had a look at them through the telescope at the site. It was amazing to be able to see different galaxies and the craters in the moon. As Chili has one of the brightest skies in the world, it is not surprising that most of the worlds observatories are present here (together with Hawai). On a day tour from La Serena we went to visit amongst others the Capel Pisco factory in the Elqui Valley. Picso is a brandy like brandy, made of grapes of which the famous (and delicious!!) Pisco Sour cocktail is made.

This town is something different. In the middle of the desert, at 2440m above sea lever, San Pedro´s pretty houses preserve a colonial feeling. Incredible hot during the day, cold during the night. This we could notice especialy on the day we had to leave at 4 in the morning to go see the Geyser field of El Tatio. It was a truely beautifull sunrise at the geysers, but oh so cold!! (Not to mention the effort it takes to get up at 3:30 in the morning..). The landscape around San Pedro is just magical. Much of it looks what the moon must look like; huge salt deserts (los Salars de Atacama) and the weirdest sand & stone shaped sculptures in the middle of nowhere. The amazing Valle de la Luna is a good example of this.

Arriving in Iquique, close to the Peruvian border after San Pedro de Atacama, we rented a 4x4 Jeep to do a day tour through the desert to the border of Bolivia. 270km there, 270km back. Little did we know that after leaving the city we would not find any more gas stations. Sooooo; the we arrived at 3 in the afternoon at Colchane, 2km from the border in the middle of the desert but NO gasstation to be seen all around...

We ended up waiting 3 hours in the front of this guys house who supposedly sold gas. We must have just been unlucky or what, bu noone showed up. We were already getting ready to see where we could spent the night in this little desert town, ending up paying another days rent for the car, the hotel room in Iquique and loosing the bus tickets we had already bought for the morning after. I went to buy a coke on the only shed in town and casually asked around if this guy knew noone who would want to sell us gas... to my surprise, pleasure and happiness he said that he had some 25 litres at home that he would sell us if we wanted to. "If we wanted to?!!; Yes, yes, yes!!".

And so it is that by 22:30h that night we made it back to Iquique, ready to leave for Peru the next day. Floris