23 Feb - 3 days to go. Just discovered that we never received our electronic tickets from Iberia for the Barcelona to Santiago and Rio to Barcelona flights. And here's me thinking we only needed the reservation number to check in - just like Jet2, Ryanair etc. flights! I only noticed this because Val had insisted we photocopy just about everything and leave it for Abi - just in case they get stolen or something. Anyway - no problem - Iberia reckoned they'd emailed them on 7 Dec but sent them again. I wouldn't have fancied arriving at Iberia's check-in at Barcelona Airport (Prat de Llobregat) without them. Who'd have been the Prat then? Having had 3 years of getting nowhere with Spanish bureaucracy in the form of the Catastro (Spain's version of the Council Tax Dept - but actually the current earthly representation of Charles Dickens' satirical Circumlocution Office) I wouldn't have fancied our chances of getting any further South.

It has been 28 - 30°C for the past week in Santiago. Nice! We're booked in for 2 nights into the Providencia Hotel in the city before taking the bus down to where we join the MS Amsterdam at Valparaiso. As Val keeps pointing out, we then keep going South - into the glaciers and icebergs - for 2000 miles. I hope the weather at least remains as calm (no hints of roaring 40s, frantic 50s and screaming 60s) as when I last visited with Mike Akester, as we head down towards the Horn. I thought then - in the early-nineties - that of all the fishery-related places I'd visited and would have liked to go back to - with Val - Chile would be it. It was a December (equivalent to June here) when I visited Mike, Malena and Hazel's (Savka not born yet) then-home in Coyhaique. On my second night there, it snowed! - and we had to take a boat 2 hours down a river to Isla Leones and Puerto Raul Marin Balmaceda - where I was doing a fish quality workshop for the employees of the muscle processing factory there. I'd only brought Summer clothes and was so cold on the ferry, I had to don my Grimsby Town FC beanie and put the Captain's poor little Jack Russell (who was as cold as me) inside my anorak to keep us both warm.

I only saw the fjords, islands, glaciers and Paine Towers from the 'plane on the flight to Punta Arenas (to do another workshop this time with crab and whelk processors!) - but they're breathtaking! What they must be like close up! OooooH - don't get too excited. Remember we're English!