As it was a beautiful sunny day we headed out for another wander around town. El Bolson is known for its hippy culture and street market. The market was just coming to an end when we finally arrived but there was still much activity going on. As the market stalls were closing down the beers stalls seemed to remain open and there seemed to be an impromptu hippy drumming session going on outside of one of the stalls. We headed for the nearest café and grabbed ourselves a beer, sat down to listen to the hypnotic sounds of the drums and reminisce about the wonderful year we had both experienced. Wow would we ever get a year this good again? We were keeping everything crossed!

Around 7.00 pm we headed out and called Gary to wish him and co a very happy new year. After this we were going to head to a bar but it was still a little bit early so we decided to head back to our cabana, have a drink

there then head out a little later. Unfortunately just as we got near to the cabana the heavens opened and we were treated to an some extremely unfriendly weather! The rain was hard and didn’t let up all night. We decided that it wasn’t worth heading out to try and find a bar, so we figured we would just stay in - not what either of us had really expected but also it didn’t seem like it was the end of the world. The bars we had spotted seemed to be very rock orientated so we figured we certainly had better tunes!

Just before the stroke of midnight we ventured outside to let the new year in. Rob had an idea to go and say ‘Happy New Year’ to our neighbours who very kindly invited us in and we had a very merry countdown in both Chilean Spanish and English! Our neighbours it turns out were a family from Chile who were on holiday. There was Papa Bob, a 60 year old fire-fighter from Santiago