Several buses today have borne fresh-sprayed grafitti along the lines of ´Adios Juan Pablo II´.Given that it´s also Sunday I´m amazed anything´s open.

Left Santiago yesterday morning and stayed at Temuco last night. Lovely riding day. I´m now at Puerto Montt and should be able to get the ferry tomorrow night to go to Chaitén. It´s that or go the long way round which involves at least three ferries and plenty of dirt road. And it´s foggy, raining and cold (think October in the UK). At least the radiators in the hotel are the sort you can lay your gloves and trousers on.

Non-foodies and vegetarians look away for the next para.

Steaks are stupendous. My chums in the UK know what a pain I am with fillet; has to be perfect, and very blue. Astonishingly, in Chile a blue steak is ´al Inglese´, which is difficult to believe as getting a blue steak in Britain is a struggle. So in any restaurant at all you can have a blue 12oz fillet with loads of salad (consists of avocado, huge toms, finely-sliced runner beans, rocket, corn, other stuff) with a bottle of very smooth merlot shiraz (Terra Andina is good) for, ooh, around a fiver. Awful, isn´t it?

I´m bit at sea over mileage now as the figures were in the stolen notebook. However, I know I´d done around 17,000 miles to Sydney, and I´ve done about 1,000 bumbling around Sydney and Santiago, so I´m restarting the clock at 18,000.

Great to be back on the road again.