The great thing about hotel buffet breakfasts is that you can make yourself a packed lunch.Pootled up into the mountains today. Santiago sits at around 2,000ft; I´m staying fairly centrally, and five miles up the road the city stops abruptly; you fork right on to a country lane which starts rising rapidly; and it only takes another half hour to get right out of the city and up to 7,000ft. Around 25km further and you're at nearly 10,000ft and the road stops, about 5 miles from the Argentine border. The road´s not bad, but deteriorates the higher you get in addition to the frequent landslides. This makes the very steep hairpins, some of which have adverse cambers and no safety barriers, awfully interesting.

There are ski resorts up there but they´re closed at this time of year as the snow line starts at around 12,000ft; hence the packed lunch. If anyone´s interested, I went to El Colorado, La Parva, and Valle Nevado. Next to no traffic either, which I found a little strange as I would have thought the fact that there´s nothing up there except peace and quiet and stunning scenery would be attractive to people wanting to go somewhere on a nice sunny Saturday. There were quite a lot of mountain bikers (all friendly), and I saw a few dirt bikes on the back of 4x4s but none being ridden. I don´t know about the legality or otherwise of trail riding here, but as the pavements (and just about everything else) in the city seem fair game to all including the carabineros (looks like an enduro paddock outside the local police station some evenings) I can´t imagine there´s much problem.

I´ve had to recalibrate my Wow-scale. So, the Andes just here are at about 5 on the 1-to-10 scale, allowing me some leeway in both directions. I´m afraid there´ll be no more pix uploaded for a while, unless I can persuade the little Kodak camera that Charlie Rauseo gave me to function properly and not eat AAs. Obviously I still have the Nikon SLR, but you´ll have to wait till I get back for those pix (transparencies, and put on to CD at process time). Of course, if the insurance pays out I´ll probably buy another Panasonic like the one that was nicked.

I´m not usually terribly good on flora and fauna, but some things are unmistakable. Today I saw condors gliding and circling on the thermals. They are truly enormous, and you can see them just twitching the feathers at the wingtips to manoeuvre. They just seem to hang there, so slowly are they moving.