Tuesday 1 June

Hola! to anyone reading this.

Made it to Copiapo yesterday morning to be greeted by a cold wind and thick grey cloud just about down to ground level. Much lower and it would definitely be fog.

The plane from Santiago was delayed by about an hour and a half for reasons that weren't communicated. Maybe it was for the best that they don't mention the reason? "We're having trouble finding an intermittent fault with the navigation equipment" isn't the sort of thing to fill you with confidence at 6.30AM, so ignorance is probably appropriate!

I had a nice window seat, unfortunately on the ocean side of the country. What I could see of the snow-covered Andes soaring above the clouds on the other side of the plane looked pretty darn spectacular, despite being backlit by the rising sun. Seeing jagged peaks, volcanoes etc. continues to amaze me, coming from the land of low, rounded hills. And all this is before the snow adding to their transformation. I'm sure I'll get some good photo's at some point, but alas, none at the moment.

The view of the coast line was largely obscured by patches of sea fog/cloud. The bits that stuck out through the fog, grey islands in a rippled sea of white, were also spectacular, but relatively few. Patches of coastline also looked pretty interesting, with scattered villages and the occasional larger towns, and very few roads. Makes you appreciate the effort of the Great Ocean Road in Victoria (and similar elsewhere in the country) for enabling appreciation of the coastline. I did get an overview of the city of Valparaiso, which rates high on the Lonely Planet list of places to visit in Chile and while hard to see a lot of detail from 10,000m, it looks a likely place to visit at some point in time, at the least for its geographic setting.

On arrival at Copaipo, I got the keys to my apartment and had an opportunity to look around it in more detail than I'd done previously. It's still OK, but the main attraction is still the location, rather than the building itself. My first job was to figure out which of the 30 or so keys laying around went in which lock! Then came the excitement of finding out what was behind each door! Unfortunately it was largely disappointing, with no major finds - old sheets, towels, pillows and a vacuum cleaner weren't much chop! The supplied kitchen stuff is largely as expected - old stuff that has seen better days, sourced (probably) from second hand shops. I'm pleased I've brought a selection of this stuff with me. It's not that it isn't functional, but...

The next mission was to get the hot water system working, at which I failed miserably. 'Showering' therefore was done via sponge/cloth from a 15L bucket filled with water heated on the stove. It certainly wasn't a miserable excercise, given the temperature isn't too cold yet, but it will be nice to be able to have a proper shower in due course.

The water is relatively hard - the pot I used for heating water on the stove has a thin coating of a whitish substance in it this morning - some form of carbonate I imagine. I don't imagine it is the best thing for passing through kidneys, so some form of filter or bottled water will be necessary before too long, which will mean braving the shopping centre again.

Last nights experience wasn't too bad, as I had a guide to help out. The basic arrangements are much the same as in Australia of course, but the specifics are wildly different. The majority of the food items that are familiar and comfortable to us in Oz are just not here, let alone the mystery of the 40 different packages of rice that are clearly different types, but what are they? The word "arborio" certainly didn't appear on anything I saw. It will be interesting to see whether that which I bought is actually what I thought I was buying! I didn't find any baked beans, Kan-Tong, Dolmio or anything like that which makes life easy, so it looks like cooking from scratch will be more necessary than I've had to before, which will be a good challenge. Paying for the whole lot was also interesting, with a demand to see my passport (and diligent recording of the details) before my credit card would be accepted. All that, and not once has anyone actually bothered to check whether my signature matches the one on the card!

Ah well, work beckons. It will be interesting to see what today brings!

Chao!