The best laid plans....

So we woke up this morning with a plan. We were going to go back to the coast, further north than we had been before, for a few days of sun and sea before hitting the city of Valparaiso on Thursday. 3 nights in Valparaiso, then Santiago (capital city) on Sunday, ready to fly out Tuesday.

It turns out you can't get a bus north out of Santa Cruz without going via Santiago. That's fine, we get to Santiago and change to a bus for the coast... but....we got to Santiago and couldn't be bothered to wait 2 hours at a bus station, so we dug out a flyer for a hostal, and have spent a pleasant afternoon in the capital city.

It's not the coast, but at least we've been enjoying the sunshine, rather than sitting on a packed bus with smooching teenagers. In fact, we are surrounded by people smooching. We just went up to a tower on a hill with a park, full of people smooching. If you burnt it down you'd halve the teenage pregnancy rates.

Santiago is a bustling, busy city. We hit the Plaza de Las Armas - a central square with the cathedral and various other grandiose buildings on its edges. Here we figured, do as the locals do. So we bought ice-cream and sat on a bench. We decided not to embarrass ourselves and join the games of chess taking place in an old bandstand.

Make me beautiful
The observant among you might have noticed how Martin has been looking a bit bouffant and Kara a tad tangle-headed.

We've been talking about getting our barnets trimmed for a while but have been a bit too scared (Kara's not had a haircut since the UK).

By accident, we found ourselves in the hairdressers mall. We kid you not. An entire mall devoted to hair salons. We picked a unisex one, with friendly looking folk and sat down in adjacent chairs, like gossiping old ladies. The clues were there. The 80s music. The way they were all smiling in a kind of we're laughing at you but in a nice way. The man with the long, curly black hair and tattooes (think Slash from Guns n Roses but a bit more feminine). The slightly camp older man doing Kara's hair. The semi pornographic, but discrete, photos of buff young men. The photo of Martin's hair stylist (Ahmed) dressed in drag.

Yep, we managed to find Santiago's gay hair salon. And our hair looks great.