30 Hours and counting

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It's actually been a sort of vacation this last week or so. You know the lie back and do nothing variety.

We spent 3 nights in Valdivia with our daily itinerary revolving around sleeping, wandering arond town, though always ending up at the fish market to watch the sea lions, then after lunch somewhere we'd wander back to our hostel and spend the afternoon reading and watching cable TV. The highlight of the three days was when Christie stumbled upon a seven episode marathon of Arrested Development. Man were we in heaven.

Our last day in Valdivia coincided with the Presidential Elections, and I spent the night recovering from my misery over Pinera's loss to Bachelat whils the rest of Valdivia drove around and around in their cars and pick ups honking their horns and shouting joyously. My sorrow was made worse by the fact that you can't even buy beer on election days to drown them away. I´m sure Pinera would have changed that if he had won the Presidency.

Wanting to leave those bad memories behind, we set off back to Hostel La Torre Suiza in Villaricca. Christie had another one of her "I'm the queen of the cycling world days" and we ended up chalking up 133kms to knock it over in a single day. I had another one of my "I´m hot and tired, I *really* don't want to talk to Christie, and please oh please can the last 30kms be all down hill because my legs don´t work anymore" days.

It was nice to be back where we started from, and also to only have to cycle 25kms the following day to reach Pucon where we settled down in Hospedaje Marjorie for the next four nights.

I've been fighting a bit of a cold and sore throat ever since the Navimag Ferry (probably mad cow disease of cattle flu) and I think that long day of cycling knocked me around so I figured I needed some rest.

On our first night at the Hospedaje, at 1am in the morning, the people in the house two up from the Hospedaje started installing a window frame into their front porch so for the next hour they were hammering and banging and shouting .... IT WAS 1AM in the F*CKING MORNING FOR GOD´S SAKE!!!! This was made more frustrating by the fact that even if I shouted at them at the top of my voice ... nobody would understand what I'm saying.

As usual we'd timed out visit to Pucon almost to perfection ... there was an international half iron man on the 22nd which would be really cool to watch. It would have been perfection if we didn´t have bus tickets out of there on the 21st. So close , and yet so far.

On our last day in Pucon we managed to summon up enough energy to cycle the 25kms up to Lago Calabromo (or something like that). It's one of those gorgeous, 'this must be what Pucon used to be like' places that you discover on the last day somewhere and wish you'd discovered on the first day. We had a lovely ride up there, had lunch on the lake, then lazed around and swam a bit before heading back to another night of noise and sleeplessness in Pucon.

We caught a day bus back up to Santiago yesterday (Saturday) after busting another one of those great travellers myths ... that it makes more sense to catch night buses as you don't have to pay accomodation. It would have cost us 25000 pesos each for a night bus, whereas we got our day tickets for 7,700 pesos each. Given you can get a private room for around 15000 pesos we'd basically just discovered that we've been ripping ourselves off for the past five months. Go us.

It was nice to get back to Santiago, but only because it meant that we'd completed our last long distance bus trip 😊). We also called into Hostal La Casa Roja and finally picked up my bank card!!!! with two days left in South America I finally have access to money for the first time on this trip. Go me (conveniently timed some might say).

So with less than 30 hours until we get on a plane, our bikes are all cleaned up and back in their bike bags and our thoughts are firmly back in Australia and it´s flavoursome food, movies in English, Triple JJJ's hottest 100 (bring on Australia Day, we´ve already organised the BBQ, beer and Chilli Prawns!), people who respect the sanctity of a quiet nights sleep, Jazzy dog (of course) and the need to get back to work to pay off our credit cards. Be warned on this last point as over the last week I´ve been reading everything from Winston Churchill´s Autobiography to Tom Seller´s ¨In Search of Excellence¨ so I´m all fired up ... at least until I get distracted by eBay ... which reminds me I have a bid going on these cool lights you can attach to your bicycle wheels so I better end this blog and see how that´s going.

29 and a half hours to go ....

JKD.

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