Aliens stole our laptop and muslibars

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Nick writing here:

So your saying yeah right, aliens would stoop to such levels as to steal our laptop and muslibars along with camera chargers and power cables.

The story was that we were staying in a private campground in Pisco Elqui in Chile. The Elqui value is meant to be filled with cosmological energy and has had repeated UFO sightings amongst more stranger occurances.

The ladron or theif slashed their way in when we were out on a day trip to an observatory on one of the high mountain tops around vicuna. About 400kms north of Santiago. Now to see stars some of you may think that all it requires is a large saucepan on your head and a baseball bat. But in chile it requires cold still dry air only found in the northern mountains in the dry desert like north.

So unfortunately much of what i would like to show you picture wise was stolen from us because most of our pictures were on our laptop, and backup external harddrive which was also stolen. Any as luck goes we then found out that australia customs had damaged our backup DVD of our photos we had burnt only 2 weeks before with the rest of our photos. We are still currently trying to get that rescued, but it might be sionara to most of our travel photography. Bugger.

Oh well, i guess life must move on.

So moving on from pisco elqui, rin and i when and did some diving in the waters of Las Tacas, Coquimbo, Chile.

We had a great dive instructor Stefano, who put me through my paces to get my PADI open water dive course. The main challenges of learning in chile are the language and the temperature of the water. Only 13 degrees C. We had 7mm wetsuits on including hoods booties and gloves to combat the temperature. The diving was great fun, but its all a prelude to heading up to the galapagos and costa rica for some more serious diving fun.

On from 3 days of diving and saying goodbye to stefano and his family. (Who by the way i cant recommend highly enough of his dive master skills and approach to teaching http://www.aquatour.cl/ he also speaks english, just confirm early before the course and you wont have to do the exam in spanish)

So next stop was Santiago, which felt more like a holding pattern for us while we got our affairs in order after the robbery. Most of the time we spent getting over colds, going on an expatriate hash run as ring ins, and then seeing as many movies as we could for the equivalent of $6 each.

Santiago i must say is a pretty easy city to get around in with its metro, but having come from the delights of larger cities like Rio and Buenos Aires, i think its probably our least favourite of them so far. Thats probably purely because of our experiences beforehand and the monotony of dealing with Australian Banks to get credit cards organised and Insurance companies.

Next stop bolivia and onto some more exciting, picturesque and interesting stories to tell.

Nick and Rin

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