Arica

We don´t have a signal for the netbook here so I am typing this on the hotels computer - so no pics for a while I´m afraid.

Yesterday we made the journey from Arequipa to Arica in Chile and it was one boring journey! We caught a taxi at 6:15am to the bus station, it took a few atempts as most taxis wouldn´t take the enormous surf board bag! We arrived at the bus and climbed on to 2nd class, no leather seats here - but at least they did recline. We then set off on our 6 hour journey south to Tacna (the border of Peru and Chile). The journey was endless and wound it´s way through miles and miles of desert, I´m sick to death of desert now. It´s so barren, so lifeless, literally when you looked out of the window there was no life, only crosses on the side of the road every few feet where people had died. Every so often a little voice in the back of your mind would say,´Please don´t break down here in the middle of bloody nowhere!¨ I saved my sandwich just in case.

So the only thing to do was watch the films which they show along the way, this would be ok, but they showed English films, dubbed into Spanish with English subtitles, and you have to listen to them as they blare out of the speakers... Finally the ordeal was over and we arrived at Tacna station, now we just had to cross the border. Before we have always gone across on the bus which has been much nicer as we just had to get our passport stamped and back on the bus. But this time we had to take all our luggage from one bus terminal to another, then buy a ticket to pass through the terminal and find a taxi (that would take our boards) and this would drive us to Arica. We found a taxi big enough and loaded the luggage and then another man got in, and then another man got in!! The taxi driver took our passports off and I thought, ´Bloody hell, now we have no passports and we don´t know where we are or where we are going and there are two strange men in the car´... and then I thought...¨Just breath and relax and it will all be fine¨. And it was fine, we drove to the border stood in a queue and had our passports stamped, then drove to the the next border, unloaded all our stuff, stood in another queue and had our passports stamped again and then drove through into Chile, we also realised that in the space of 10 mins the time had jumped from 2:30 to 4:30, It´s two hours ahead here. Wierd!

The taxi dropped us at a hotel we had seen on the internet, it´s a bit run down, but is right on the sea front and has a balcony that looks over the sea. I have been a bit spoilt with accomodation recently so I guess I´ll just have to slum it for a few days. So today will consist of surfing, and then we will walk to the centre and try and book our flights to Santiago , hopefully for Monday or Tuesday. I´ll try and update tomorrow!! Bye for now x