Kristy & Adam - South America Adventures

Hola from Chile!

Hope you`re all well!! We`re finally into our last month of travel, I can`t believe its nearly over!! Over the past few days we travelled down from San Pedro Atacama to Antofagasta and then onto La Serena.

Antofagasta was a real culture shock after coming from San Pedro Atacama and Bolivia. We read somewhere that the `South American Culture` would dissapear when arriving in Chile and it certainly has, there is no more traditional dressed women, no more artesian market stalls and no more real culture in the streets. Antofagasta is on the coastline and had a big city like feeling with large malls and supermarkets and not a real lot going on. It was strange to see proper supermarkets again after all this time we ended up spending a few hours walking around the mall!

After a day in Antofagasta we decided to move on and head down the coast to La Serena, after our rough ride through Bolivia we decided to upgrade our bus tickets to `Salon Cama` style. The bus trip was better than economy class in an aeroplane!! The seats were huge, leather and reclined 65 degrees. The staff came around and put pillows behind our heads and blankets on our laps and we managed to get about 7 hours sleep (The journey was about 12 hours)
We arrived early in the morning so we found a really nice hostel and then roamed around the city streets for a few hours.

The afternoon was horrible, we took our memory cards into a shop to get put onto disk and to cut a long story short the women operating the machine really had no idea what she was doing, and they were coming up with errors and corrupt and basically the machine wasn`t reading the photos. We took then to a second place and the photos weren`t even showing up anymore. I checked them in my camera and half of them were gone! Needless to say I was very upset as we had lost 3 countries worth of photos. We ran back to the first shop to check their computer again, and when we put the memory cards into their machine again they reappeared!! HEART FAILURE!! I feel really sorry for Adam yesterday, luckily he`s so patient
We decided to not put Adam`s pictures onto a disc yet but we will in the next few days then we will put some online

Today we had a late breakfast then hired some bikes from the hostel and rode down along the beach front then stopped for a picnic lunch.
Tomorrow we are having a relaxing day again, then heading further south down to the countries capital Santiago.

Keep in touch
Kristy & Adam