Today, Juan & Flo would take us into Santiago for some shopping. I particularly wanted to buy some natural history books and field guides to enable me to put names to the non-cactoid plants that we had seen during the trip.

The plan was to drive to a large underground car park, right in the middle of Santiago, where we would lose the car for he day. My only previous experience of driving through Santiago was in 2003 and 2004 when we needed to follow the provider's of our rented vehicles to their HQ to complete some formalities. These had been nightmare journeys, immediately after long haul flights and not yet tuned into the local language and without prior planning. This time we would have Flo & Juan with us as guides, although sometimes they wanted to take us to different places, but after a couple of laps past the Library, we were safely parked and I was lugging a large bag of books around. Another shop on the list was some distance away, so that we decided to catch the underground, very modern and quite busy as we're used to in major cities around the world.

The crowds provided the perfect opportunity for the pick-pockets that also operate on all underground trains in major cities around the world. I had spread money and cards around 4 different pockets around my pockets and the thieves got away with the Chilean equivalent of 100 GBP (roughly US$ 200). Leo asked me how I could have been so stupid to use one of my back pockets for this amount. He had all his money safely in the front pocket of his trousers ..... until he discovered that this too had been taken. At least our cards were safe, so that although the event put a bit of a damper on the day, I returned to the peace of Lonquen, pleased with a nice selection of book titles.