Day 138 - The most expensive meal ever!

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Having forced our hungover heads out of bed, we trudged to the bus stop. If proof were needed that cheap wine makes you suffer the next day then we were it. Well, Gemma was it actually. Today we headed to Punta Arenas, a much bigger city on the Magellan Strait. This is the stretch of water that separates Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn from the mainland and is an important shipping route (because it avoids being ship-wrecked off Cape Horn).

So we went through the usual routine: fight past accommodation providers aggressively loitering at the bus station, find somewhere to stay ourselves, dump our bags, decide to go for a walk to get our bearings and end up in a bar or restaurant within about 3 minutes ordering some food. We went to La Luna, a good little traveller-friendly place with a map of the world on the wall into which you pin the mini flag you are given to show where you're from. Obviously not everyone takes it seriously, including Dave from Kazackstan, Johan from North Korea and several people from the South Pole, but it still gives an idea of the breakdown of visitors to this part of the world. Basically it's dominated by Europeans, with quite a few Americans and surprisingly few Japanese (unless they just struggle to reach their bit of the map - can we say that?). We inhabited Torridon, or there abouts, as the the south of England was a little crammed.

Anyway we bumped into our friends from the boat, Eddie and Sally, who had clearly abandoned their plans for a full circuit of Torres del Paine (infact the weather had turned for the worse and it just was not fun anymore, so we were extremely lucky with the weather we got). We had lunch at a table next to them, also chatting with a gay Australian couple and 3 enormous steak-eating Texan ex-pats. Those 2 tables didn't really know what to make of each other and eyed each other suspiciously like a dog and a cat.

After an afternoon exploring Punta Arenas, and not finding much to be honest, we met up with our frinds for dinner and drinking. We had excellent fun and really enjoy spending time with them - very easy company. The highlight of the evening was a conversation about strange meals, starting with sheep's brain (Ed) and sheep's testicles (Gemma), but being well and truly trumped by a story about a 1 course meal costing in the region of £5,500 - that was 2 prize-winning racing pigeons accidentally eaten whilst on an army survival training.

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