Day 14 - 18 hours in Chillan
 
Tur-Bus seems to be a good outfit and we have had no problems with getting anywhere as yet . So after checking out of the great place that had been home for 2 days it was down to the bus station for 9am and our bus south. Today was the test run the new flasks and the hope of saving money by not having to buy coffee all day? Our journey would take about 7 hours mainly down the Pan-American Highway with occasional glimpses of the snow covered mountains of the Andes on our left. Heading south as has been the case since we entered the states back in June the bus by passed Santiago and kept on going.

The scenery to us was very reminiscent of New Zealand's North Island lots of farming and dotted around vineyards advertising tastings and tours. The longer the journey went on the more regular a volcano / mountain would appear on the left hand side prompting Nik to go into apoplexy trying to take a steady photo through the glass whilst we are doing 100km/h. It does work apparently although it does render one speechless and incapable of multitasking and it affects the individuals tongue - it appears on one side of the mouth sort of listless .The houses surprised us too, you could have been back in Romsey or even our Solihull culdesac, four bedrooms, detached two level houses just like home, the money here was not what we had anticipated!

Anyway this journey went on abit but we did eventually arrive in the paradise town of Chillan. Not really sure what we expected we were just pleased to get off this bus. Chillan is sort of ok it doesn't really offend and is a perfectly good place to break a journey up. But where do you sleep? The trusty guidebook pointed us in a rough direction and off we went we needed cheap very cheap but sadly it turned out we had the wrong idea.

The first place was indescribable through a locked entry and round a bit of a rabbit warren, we were shown our potential boudoir I actually believed at this point Norman Bates would appear from around the corner and ask Nik for a shower. The place was not good and they wanted more than had paid previously not good . After some fruitless attempts at getting people to answer the doors we ended up at a good place, well a tad run down, no wifi (even though it was amusingly painted all across the house in BIG letters!) and the windows looked like they were about to fall out but it was clean and thats what matters. 

We got settled and went off to see the sights and eat. Cathedral was different very modern compared to any others we had seen on the entire trip, apparently this concertina effect inside withstands earthquakes, very different, then we ate! After that it was a case of searching for provisions for the next day's bus to Pucon which booked for 10.15 the next morning. Finding ourselves on the wrong side of the tracks quite literally we checked out a little deli and got stocked up. Lying in bed that night with the cable TV churning out the same stuff as we get at home it was quite a surreal feeling; we were on the move again just the two of us no-one else around and it was all good.