Santiago, Chile
I arrived yesterday morning to Santiago on the 13 hr bus from Puerto Mont. I´ve heard from many travelers that Santiago is not great for backpackers and I´m out to prove them all wrong. I had a great first night out with Coleen, her daughter Jen and her friend Lucy. We ended up in the Irish bar where Lucy works "Flannerey´s". The genuine Irish publican was thrilled to have a genuine Irish girl in his establishment and especially one who was drunk enough to give a crowd moving (ie. many got up and left) rendition of U2´s "with or without you" in the Karioke.
Today I went to Valpariso for the day but really didn´t get to see much of it as it pissed out of the heavens relentlessly from the moment we arrived till well after we had left (a soft day thank God). So most of Valpariso was seen from the safety of my seat on the bus where the rain on the glass obscured everything into a sort of moving monet painting. Even so we did get to enjoy a good fish meal in "Marriscaria Isabel 3".
The people of Santiago are building a road along the river bed of the large smelly river that runs through the city, they´ve sort of channeled the river along the side of the new road. It all seems pretty crazy to me for a place that is prone to flooding (26 people died in Santiago´s floods last year) and the irony is that after todays heavy rains nature made rivers out of the citys roads while the city attempts to make roads out of natures rivers.

Puerto Mont, Chile
It´s hardly worth putting in a post about Puerto Monte cause it´s such a dull place, I´m only writing it cause I´ve already checked out of my hotel and I´ve another 8 hours before my bus leaves. I would go sightseeing but there´s nothing to see and it´s pissing rain, Puerto Mont is the identical twin of Bray, the pimple in the landscape of an otherwise pretty coastline. I wandered around looking for somewhere to eat yesterday with Coleen from NZ and I found myself looking out for the run down amusement arcades that can be found in Bray. It´s such a strange thing to find such a carbon copy of Bray, even down to the hill at the end of the promenade with the cross on top and the bandstands littering the promende with no sign of a band ever playing in them. I think my best option for the rest of the day is to hunt out ´The Porter House´ and station myself by the fire with a pint.

Bariloche
Well the last couple of days has been like travelling through the seasons for me, at the beginning of the week I was in the mid summer sunshine of Paraty and then the "wear a jumper in the evening" weather of Florinopolis and then on to the Autumnal windy chill of Montevideo and Buenas Aires. I left Bs As last night and traveled through the autumn, the scenery out my window was becoming more brown and orange and the rain was falling as I went to sleep. I woke up this morning as winter was decending on the Patagonian country side, stripping the cypress trees of their leaves so all that remained was lines of tall wispy skeletons deviding the fields. As the day wore on we drove deeper into winter until finally I reached the Patagonian oasis of Bariloche with it's icey lakes and snowey mountains. It's cold here, I only got an idea of how cold it would be when two people at the bus station asked me if I was going to ski in Bariloche. It's also beautiful, like I would imagine Switzerland to be, big lakes, fir trees and huge snow covered mountains, I'm staying in a wodden cabin type of hostel.