Chile - 23 December, 2001

.

Travel Distance

Leg 1 Total:

8,544 km

Galapagos:

771 km

Grand Total:

9,315 km

Today we head to La Serena, where we will be spending Christmas.  After a drive of about 3 hours we arrive in the town and head straight to the mall.  It seems like we are back in the U.S. somewhere.  First to the supermarket, where we spend a ton of money doing our Christmas shopping.  We divide the meals and each party heads off with its cart to get their goods.  In the end, I am not sure how many shopping carts we filled up, but we had a tough time fitting it all in the truck.  Then we had a few hours to wander around the mall to get lunch and do our own shopping.

When we were able to pull ourselves away from the mall, we headed to the camp site, which is near the beach.  We set up our camp and then a few of us headed over to the chalet that Tom and Heather, our new friends, had rented.  We had a few drinks there before we wandered back for dinner.  They put on a nice meal - starters included prawn cocktails!!!

After a few more drinks, we had an early night.  But sleep was often interrupted by the many parties going on around us and the people staggering back to their tents.  Some could not even find their tents and one tent was made uninhabitable by someone being sick in it (they slept outside near out tent).