A very wet place.

After I was in the north of Chile, I flew for about 5 hours to Puerto Montt which is nearly to the bottom of the country. It is very green and very wet. It didn´t stop raining for about 7 days. There a many volcanos here but because the clouds were so low I did not ever see the top of the mountains.
But one day when I was having lunch at the wharf by the fish market, playing in the sea underneath, were about 12 huge sea wolves which, I think, are sea lions or eared seals. They were gobbling up all the guts from the fish that the fishermen were throwing over the side of the boat, and after they had fed they just stayed playing for about an hour.
I went to the island of Chiloe which is a big island just off the coast of Chile. It took 31/2 hours by bus and ferry. I stayed there and went to school for two weeks at the primary and the secondary school. It was very interesting.
The children do not have a big, big playground like we do and have to play inside all the time and with 800 students there, it is very noisy.
They also eat a very big breakfast and a very big lunch at school which the government pays for.
For breakfast they have a ham and cheese roll, very big, and milo. For lunch they are given a salad, meat, vegetables and rice or potatoes and a dessert.
Kerri Kiwi really liked it there because the ground is really wet and there were lots of bugs to eat.
Sam I am really glad that you are reading the posts with your mum and sending me some messages. Sometimes it takes a wee while to answer as I dont always have a computer.

San Pedro.

Did you know that the desert up here is the driest in the world?
Last weekend we went to a very small town called San Pedro de Atacama. We drove for 4 hours and never saw a drop of water or any plants except some very dry, small bushes and some cactus plants.

There are mountains all around, with the very high Andes between Bolivia and Chile and Argentina. There is not much snow up there at the moment.

The town we went to is a very old town. The houses are all adobe. The bricks are made out of mud mixed with straw and plastered together. Because it hardly ever rains the roofs of the houses are made out of grass like pampas, this is more to keep the sun out.
The streets are very narrow and there are dogs, that everyone seems to feed, everywhere in the town.
It is so beautiful!
On Sunday we got up at 4 in the morning and went to see the Tatio Geysers. It was so cold. The temperature was -15. We were at the about the same height as Mount Cook 12,000 ft above sea level. Do you know what a geyser is and how it is formed?
On the way back after having a swim in the very hot pools, a volcano was erupting in the distance. There was quite a lot of smoke and steam coming out.