With the piece finally done and emailed to Adam Cooke in South Africa it was time to face the daunting task of starting to bring the diary up to date. At least we´d made some comprehensive notes from the last few weeks. Lisa spent the best part of day hand washing our gear.

Sebastian has been great. Easy company from a guy that genuinely wants to help and for whom nothing seems to be too much. We wanted to to say thankyou and so cooked up dinner for the three of us. Giso (Argentinian stew), with 2 bottles of the red stuff at a staggering 90p a bottle to wash it all down we had a great evening talking nonsense and travel. The warm glow of the boiler was a stark contrast to the howling freezing wind battering at the windows.

By 9:30am the coffe had been brewed and Sebastian’s ever smiling face was pondering over which of the ´Facturas` (cakes) to dive into first. With coffee and cakes in hand, I was stalling for time…outside looked freezing.

“So we go”, exclaimed Sebastian enthusiastically. 15 minutes and on the other side of town we arrived at his friends shop and 5 litres of 20-50 oil were being decanted into our plastic container. With the 80-90 gear oil found it was time to head back. 55 Pesos (10 quid sounded fair).

I knew exactly how lucky we´d been finding ´Club Nautico´…the service needed to be done and here we were not just under cover but inside, with a warm fire going plenty of light and coffe on tap.

My plan to service both bikes turned out to be a little overly optimistic. By 6:00pm I´d finally finished having wasted hours with cross threaded nuts and bolts in most areas. It´s probably time to make some new threads and pick up some shiny new bolts. The plan to leave tomorrow has now been scraped and now I´ll sort out Lisa´s bike in the morning and then get some diary done.

You get the idea and so the day continued. After a day of ‘fannying around’ I finally got done with Lisa’s bike at around 6pm.
With the bikes serviced and our packing done we’re both excited again about the idea of getting on the road tomorrow and this time spending a little longer in Chille.