Other than that, I’ve just been mostly wandering round the markets. I am fascinated by the women here, and no, not in that way, the ones who are mid forties and over.. the younger girls could be from anywhere, but the women all still wear the traditional garb.. big felt hats and colourful shawls, which they carry a seemingly endless amount of shopping in and often at the same time as carrying a child or two, a feat made even more impressive by the fact that many of them seem to be under 4 foot tall. For sale on the market stalls are a huge variety of colourful hand knitted jumpers and hats, and on the more extreme side, coca leaves, witches potions and dried llama foetuses that apparently bring you good luck if you bury one under the doorway of your new house. Hmm.

There’s an English pub here that sportingly offers free shots for fouls on John Terry during televised Chelsea games.. cruel, but there’s definitely part of me that found it very funny that a pub could single out one player so much!

Will give a fuller report on La Paz when I return here in a week.. have got myself a job as a barman in the hostel I’ve been staying at, so am heading off for my first overnight bus journey in Bolivia this evening to Uyuni, home of the famous salares (salt flats).. will head back up north to fit in a week of pulling pints to tall travellers’ tales before moving onto Machu Machu land

One advantage it does have over East Sussex’s regional capital is it’s sunsets. Beuatiful pinky purple ones that crowds gather to watch by the harbour. Oh, and also it’s about 35 degrees there, I’m guessing Lewes is not.

A photo would be useful to illustrate this sunset here I suppose.

Montevideo was pleasant enough, though I didn’t find a great deal to see and do there to be honest. It was stupidly hot compared to Patagonia, about 37 degrees, and I didn’t help my first day off to the best start by staying up drinking with a bunch of Americans til about 3am the first night. The hostel did put on an excellent asado (bbq) that evening on their rooftop terrace, complete with guitars and hammocks, so that was obviously.. awesome. I spent the next day wandering around the beachfront trying not to get sunburnt, and drinking bottle after bottle of grapefruit flavour fizzy pop. While sat under a tree in the main grassy square, a little boy came up to me and stared a lot.. I asked him his name, but he seemed more interested in my drink. When I made the internationally accepted gesture for ‘would you like to try some?’ (you know the one), he suddenly whipped out the dirtiest looking straw I’ve ever seen from his pocket, which I assume had been very recently digging in the ground, and dunked it in my bottle swirling it around.. he sipped a bit, then said ciao and ran off, leaving me with a drink that was looking part sugar, part the contents of the Mersey. I drunk it anyway.. this was yesterday, and no weird stomach effects yet.

I spent a much more sedate final evening in a rainy Montevideo inside, playing dominos and entertaining a German couple with the acoustic hits of REM and the Chilis, resting up for an early bus trip back along the coast of Uruguay.. one more stop before a Christmas in Buenos Aires.

I spent three days here generally taking it pretty easy, the highlight of which was a late evening boat trip out across the Beagle channel. The only gringo onboard a boat of brazilians, I didn’t feel I should make our guide translate everything twice just for me, so chatted away to the guides, a group of girls and a family from Sao Paulo as best I could in Spanish.. Portuguese would have probably been a step too far! From the little speed boat, we pulled right up alongside little island colonies containing hundreds of sealions and cormorants, watching them play waking each other up and jumping into the water to chase bright red buoys. We toured out to the lighthouse marking the end of the straits (and the beginning of an Antarctic voyage if you keep going!), then headed back to disembark on a island, where we climbed up to see the harbour by sunset (which isn’t til about 11 o’clock, it also got light at 4). The choppy ride back to town was accompanied by rounds of local ale from a tap onboard the boat, and loud singalongs to the greatest hits of Bob Marley

I saw a sign down by the harbour which read something like ‘The Islas Malvinas (Falklands), South Georgia Islands… are included in the jurisidiction of Tierra del Fuego. However, we should remember that these areas since 1833 have been under the illegal occupation of the United Kingdom’. Best not sing ‘Rule Britannia’ too loudly round these parts.

The hike itself was spectacular, 80 kilometres in four days being the biggest test of my fitness so far – we’ll see how I cope with bigger tests at high altitude in the next month or so! I walked the first two days by myself, visiting the towers on the first day and spending two hours at the mirador summit waiting beside a Dutch guy for the clouds to go from the third tower, which they never did. Hey ho.. the second day was pretty quiet, but on the second night, I discovered my mountain hut had a guitar, and I got there early so spent all afternoon sat on a log outside playing songs for people to arrive to, the highlight of which was finding a girl called Josephine and entertaining her with Terrorvision’s namesake song about a recent trans-sexual. I shared a dorm with five Spanish guys which was good learning for both parties, we were stood in a circle outside the hut when it was getting dark with some other people, and when I came over one of them tried to introduce me as his ‘room mate’ but instead described me as his ‘colleague of the bedroom’ – judging by the mirth this caused, I’m not entirely sure the translation quite works!

I also stayed with an american guy called Joe, and started walking on the third day with him and a British girl from Manchester called Leanne.. third day was 10 hours walking, 28 kilometres up into a section called the French valley.. really steep but beautiful scenery, huge glaciers, jagged mountains and mini little flat trees that looked Japanese. After much good behaviour and early nights with the mp3 player, the third night got a bit too social. There was a deal on the margarita-esque local drinks called pisco sours, imaginatively titled ‘happy sour’ and we stayed up chatting til 11 with a mountain guide from Chile called David, who then said he had a bottle of wine back at his tent if we wanted to share it. Thinking it rude not to, I went back with Leanne to his tent and we all passed round a bottle of wine. Around midnight, I got the feeling the two of them were getting quite friendly with each other, so thought I should go back to the mountain hut.. stuck in the no-man’s land between canvas and duvet, it was then I discovered that they’d locked the door and closed up for the night.

If I’d thought about it, I might have seen this coming. I definitely would have worn more than only a t-shirt, shorts and socks, not even shoes because I’d thought I was only going outside for 30 minutes. So no way into the building til dawn, I ummed and ahhed about going back to the tent, but the lights appeared to now be off there too and I was not keen to interrupt what may or may not have been occurring inside. It was at this point that I realised, like the Flintstones cat, I was pretty much stuck outside until dawn at least in what should have been one of the coldest places on earth! Luckily, the weather had been great all day so it wasn’t too bad.. I resisted the urge to shoult ‘Wilma’ loudly, and headed out to the long grasses for the tiniest bit of shelter. From about half midnight to three o’clock, not far from Antarctica and chuckling to myself as I tried and failed to get comfy, I curled myself up into a ball in the grass and attempted to stay warm

The one bonus was that I’ve never seen stars shining as brightly as that ever before.. it was almost full moon, but beautifully clear, with distant light still illuminating the horizon. Even with this, and the thought it would make a good story at breakfast, the novelty had definitely worn off by three-ish and I was ridiculously cold. Decided to get up and walk all around the hut to see if there was anything I could shelter in, the camper’s bathroom not being entirely discarded as an option at this point. And very luckily.. upon wandering around the perimeter of the grounds, I bumped back into David the guide.. who was looking for Leanne. I didn’t ask what had happened, but we couldn’t find her, so he said I could share his tent until the hut opened again in the morning. Reasoning that this was way better than the toilet floor, I gratefully lay down cramped at his side until about 6.30, when I thought I’d go and see if the hut was open again and get some sleep for an hour or so in a proper bed. It was, I walked in all covered in grass and sticky spherical plants, opened the door to my room, got some funny looks from people, and fell asleep before the 7.30 breakfast call.

Piecing the early hours together between the four of us over breakfast made the sleep deprivation a bit more bearable due to the general hilarity amongst the group of hikers. Joe had a relatively uneventful night asleep in his bunk after declining the offer to swig red wine from the bottle in a tent like teenagers, and had therefore slept pretty well until I stumbled noisily up to my top bunk at 7. Leanne, having mostly resisted the Chileno charms of our canvas host, had luckily identified that the window of her dorm had been open, and climbed through it, picked up her toothbrush and strolled out without anyone batting an eyelid. A very bleary eyed David was having breakfast with his Russian client and had to stay very professional throughout, apart from a few knowing winks here and there.

The final day of trekking was 22 kilometres of scorching sunshine in which the three of us followed a rocky path to Glaciar grey, shimmering blue in the sunlight, back to the refugio, caught a catamaran and bumpy bus back to town and toasted to a successful hike over salmon, eggs and burgers back at Puerto Natales, like the true athletes we were. A great few days in one of the most naturally beautiful places on Earth. Still, I’d love to see the CCTV camera footage of the actions that took place around that hut on the final evening, it must have looked ridiculous – either way, I will never forget the night under the stars in Patagonia!

Pics to follow..