¡Hola Santiago de Chile!

Nearly didn't make it courtesy of a completely unnecessary 1 1/2 hour immigration to the states through LAX. Fortunately found a flight from LAX through Miami that landed us in Santiago at 10am this morning after we missed our connection to Peru... crisis averted.

Long and short is that we made it... 36 hours after leaving Pymble.

Highlights so far:
- Bottle of vodka costing only $7
- 6-pack of beer costing only $4.75
- Cheap and very good coffee, very cheap and yummy empanadas
- Siestas in the afternoon are the norm
- Warming up for new year´s eve while the rest of you have already made a start on your resolutions.

Low-lights so far:
- Missing our first connection
- Realising how crap our spanish is (entertained a poor beggar for 5 minutes as I kept repeating "no entiendo" as he kept repeating "200 pesos?")

Wishing you all a happy new year - we´ll be celebrating in style in 4 hours!

Farewell Sydney...

24 hours to go and 101 items still unchecked on the to-do list.

We're trying pretty hard to avoid the temptation to fill every spare hole in the backpack with unnecessary t-shirts, shorts and underpants that will inevitably be discarded in favour of 16 new pairs of shoes for Sophia from Argentina.

Thanks to all our friends and family for great farewells and well-wishes.

This will not become one of those blogs with only one post. We will keep this up to date.

Packing, moving and other annoying tasks await...