Anyone know how to say "whoa" in Spanish?

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Good afternoon everyone

The four amigos are warming ourselves up for an afternoon riding horses in the mountains of Mendoza, which will be challenging enough given that none of us speak horse and we don't know the words in Spanish for the various commands.

Let me jump back a few days, to another country. After the initial excitement upon arrival in Santiago, Chile, we had a pretty busy few days there. Sunday was a hungover day, as we were saving our energy for Monday when we hoped to get a taste of what Chile was all about.

It seems that the answer to that is...gambling! On Monday we decided to go down to one of Santiago's two horse racing tracks and try our luck. Despite being in the centre of a pretty dirty city (smog is awful in Santiago), the track was quite pretty and we arrived at about 2pm. Despite being a working day, the races started at 2pm and there were 20 (yes, 20) races in all, finishing with the last race at 10pm. With a lot of guesswork we managed to get a vague idea of which were the best horses in each race (just put your money on the favourite was our motto) and we each got a few winners. Lucky Roff came out best (that's golf, fishing and now horse racing - is there anything the boy can't do?) but we all came out losers. Walking away having lost 15 grand is an interesting feeling - though 15,000 Chilean pesos actually only equates to about 15 quid.

We had a bit of a wander around the city on Tuesday, and found ourselves at the Parque Metropolitano, which sits on top of a hill on the outskirts of the city and provides great views of smog. We stumbled across Santiago Zoo so had a look, but no intensely ugly animals caught our attention. It was pretty badly cramped to be honest but the animals seemed to be well looked after.

Whilst we enjoyed Santiago after being cast adrift in the wilderness for a few weeks, 4 days was enough, so we decided to head back to Argentina on Wednesday. After a very early start we arrived in Mendoza just in time to watch the England match and lounge around by the swimming pool (this hostel has a pool and the weather has been really nice) before we had a big BBQ at the hostel.

The gorgeous weather on Thursday dictated a day sitting beside the pool and topping up our tans. There are loads of outdoor activites to do here so we expected to stay a few days. In fact, we did do something useful and booked ourselves onto a half day horse riding trek for Friday.

It was lucky that we made the most of the weather on Thursday as the weather was foul yesterday, so much so that horse riding was cancelled. We had to find alternative amusement, so found our way to the local shopping centre and spent some money.

It was one of the girls at the hostel's bithday, so everyone went out for a pretty big night last night. Despite Joff performing an impromptu swan-dive onto a table full of bottles and glasses (somehow he escaped unscathed, despite breaking pretty much everything on the table) we all had a pretty good night. It's now about 1pm and we go horse riding in a few hours - I wonder if they do horse sized Alka Seltzers?

We're staying here until probably the middle of next week, and we're going paragliding, white water rafting and on a tour of the local vineyards. After all that excitement we're not sure where we are going - we're starting to think about Macchu Picchu and the Inca Trail now, where we're planning to be for about the 15th.

AC

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