What A Difference A Weekend Makes

Time of sleep: 4:30am
Time of wake: 2:30pm
Alcohol consumed: Fair
Cigarettes smoked - last night: Plenty / today: 6
Food eaten: Limited


One hour before I left for Chile I found myself single, homeless, and once again on the very point of making a melodramatic gesture of farewell before catching the next flight back to Blighty.

One hour after I left for Chile I found myself smiling at the scenery, listening to cheerful music (one can only thank the God Lord for the magic of the Eighties) and enjoying every ridiculous memory that popped into my brain. There were many, and they were unsummoned. Walking through town handcuffed together. Dancing to Madonna in the doorway to my bedroom. Pretending to be a beetle on the living room floor. For the first time since I clutched onto the armrests of that plane, practising deep breathing and clenching back tears, I felt as though everything was, finally, going to be alright. Not even the hairpins bends steeping down from the tortured souls at immigration could dampen my mood. You have to hand it to the mountains, they do bring out the most spectacularly cliched emotions.

It must be said that there is nothing wrong with planning a trip in advance. No traveller worth his salt needs a bullet-point itinery, but the faintest idea of which direction the town centre is in, a hint of a clue of a decent hostel, and debit cards in case of unexpected bankcruptcy are all useful, nay, indispensible factors. And in the true spirit of story-telling, it was exactly these three elements that we lacked.

On disembarkment, we wandered in the general direction we had been pointed. The nearest kiosk informed us that we were not only going the wrong way, but the entirely opposite one. The unarguably helpful Chilena outside the kiosk explained to us, no less than four times, exactly how one should use the metro. And she was right, every time. You do indeed need a card. You do indeed need to load it first. You do indeed need to make sure that it doesn't run out. We were gringos, and we did indeed appear foolish.

We did not, however, claim to have an Italian restaurant, then apologise for not serving pizza.

We did stir up trouble when one of the Frenchmen could not control his natural cultural urges and insisted on vary his expression towards the next table between seductive and menacing, to the Argentinian girl and her goonish boyfriend respectively.

We did not buy the "space cakes" for sale in the street, nor tip the man making the racket with the tambourine, nor his fairly well-playing guitar-strumming counterpart.

We did spend two nights with all three of us in one bedroom, sat on the windowsill with our feet dangling over the road, smoking Kent Suave with all the flavour of a Silk Cut wrapped in cotton wool.

We did not get to swim in the sea.