Our final day on our own!

We made up for lack of sleep yesterday by sleeping until noon today missing our chance of a decent breakfast at our new hotel. It also meant I couldn't call Caroline in Singapore to wish her happy birthday - sorry about that Caroline!

Anyway, after finally facing the world we thought we would venture to Santiago's biggest park which was about 20 mins walk away from our hotel. The park includes a 14m high statue of The Virgin Mary on the top of the hill which can be seen from all over the city (when the pollution isn't too bad!). We could have walked up the hill but we opted for the funicular railway instead. It was brilliant to see the city from above to appreciate how seriously huge it is. It just sprawls for miles as far as the eye can see (smog limiting). The park at the top was lovely and actually had tourist stands selling postcards and the usual tourist tat - the first proper tourist activity we'd seen in Santiago. We walked right up to the Mary statue which was blessed by Pope John Paul II in the 80s.

Dom managed to ask a shopkeeper in Spanish for a stamp with no problems - a very proud moment for us both. He's really thrown himself into learning Spanish and now wants to do a course when we get home. I'll just stick to asking for the bill in restaurants - that's as far as my Spanish goes. I'm better at dead languages like Latin although joking aside, knowing Latin has been useful in understanding some Spanish words. Between us we make a good team (not sure whether the Chileans would agree though!).

We wandered back into town and read our books again in Parque Forestal (the same park as the other day - the one with the trees!). Having eaten a main meal at lunch we just had a snack and headed back to the hotel for an early night. The taxi was booked at 6am tomorrow to take us to the airport to go to Peru so we were getting a 5.30am wake up call - nice!

It was a lovely last day in Santiago but we were both looking forward to getting to Peru and being in a decent hotel on a proper tour. Well, that's what we were hoping for anyway.....