Arica to santiago

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just kicked aroundarica for the day,waiting for our night bus to copaipo, the carnival was still carying on but at a much slower pace and the costumes seemed to be less revealing aswel, which was much nicer to watch. We saw Alex the guy we saw in puno in Arica and it turned out that he also lefton the same flight our of england as us, which is proper weird and he is doing exactly the same as us just in 5 months instead of four. we walked up the cliff over arica pretty damn good veiw, very different to what we have been used to, just vast amounts of mountainous desert, could feel the heat coming off the sand, which was pretty immense. the night bus was so nice, loads of room, and massive windows, and the food was really nice too, only biscuits but nice buscuits, the sunset that evening was so nice, the colours seemed the move down the sky, starting with light pink streaks going into a pretty vivid red on the horizon, and every colour of the rainbow going up above that but i feel asleep at this point and apparently it got loads better but oh well i'll get over it, woke up about 10 hours later and had a few more hours to go, but we saw calderia which is where we were going to stay after copaipo, a complete shit hole so we decided to get the night bus again that night to santiago, but then too our horror the family infront of us starting frigging changing their babies shitty nappy, i was so not impressed and it smelt for a good few minutes.
we still had about hours in copiapo, very much like arica again, but not as nice, so glad we decided to keep going, but had our bags on us for the whole day went into a resturant and the place when silent as we walked in with our bags and everyone stared at us pretty funny, thats where justin ordered probably the manciest burger ever but i decided to have a weird cake and it was a good choice after looking at all the other food being served there.
The night bus this time was even better than before it wasnt a double decker and had a lot less people on, we were also at the back so we could put our seats right back and stretch out loads, pretty nice! The sunset again was so good over the desert. this bus was much faster got into santiago after about 10 hours. but not the terminal we thought it was and started trying to walk to our hostel really did not work, so ended up getting a taxi, the hostel itself is so much nicer than anything else we have stayed in, but 7 quid at night so have to do a few less expensive touristy things, made many attempts to change our flights and there is absolutely no way we can get into NZ earlier so have decided to go down a little south and go to a surfing beach and a national park with a volcanoe, still going to vina del mar when camilla gets back from austria, meeting her later today hopefully. we still would really prefer to go to NZ earlier but never mind, santiago is much nicer than peru, peru was starting to annoy us both with the rain and shitcovered shanty towns.
the first day in STago we spent walking around town getting flipping lost all the time, not having a clue where to go, but managed to make our way round, but feeling confident later went out for food without a map big mistake spent so much time just randomly turning corners to try to find where we were going. we ended up finding a dunkin doughnut and had a smoothie and doughnuts for dinner healthy!!! and then spent a good half hour again finding our way back in the end we asked for directions. we learnt our lesson after that not to turn corners and to always take a map.
the next day we visited the park in santa lucia it was actually like a paradise, in the middle of the city so goergous, palm trees and fountains everywhere, and these steps going to the some old church buildings and a veiw point at the top which looked over the entire city pretty unbelievable, it also had its own lift out of the city up to the park, it actually reminded of the film charlie and the chocolate factory, with all the random stuff there that really did not fit into to the ciity and surroundings.

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