La Serena, Chile, and you can call us tonight or tomorrow

I love the place where we´re staying in La Serena. It´s a private house belonging to a woman named Iris. She lives here, and also rents out three or four rooms. We have full access to the kitchen and the clothes washing machine. And we can receive calls on the telephone! It is expensive for us to call you (and we can´t do it from Iris´house) but it´s very cheap for you to call us from the U.S. So if you want to catch up with us by phone, tonight or tomorrow night (Halloween) is the time. The cheapest way by far is to buy an international phone card for $5 or $10. You can call us from the US at 011-56-51-225175.

We are one time zone east of the U.S. Eastern time. And it´s best to call us after 8 our time. So that means between 6 and 8 p.m. Central time, or 5 and 7 p.m. Mountain time.

We´re really happy to hear from you by email, or by blog comments, too.

So about the place we´re staying: It´s really nice to be able to cook our own meals after so many restaurants. I have really missed Gary´s delicious cooking! Yesterday he made spaghetti with Chilean vegetables like sapayo, which is a type of squash. The kitchen is clean and Iris showed us how to clean the vegetables with a beach disinfectant. You have to do that when traveling because many vegetables are irrigated with contaminated water (probably contaminated with sewage) so it´s important to cook them or peel them, and to be extra safe you can disinfect them. The disinfectant contains bleach and so is probably not healthy in the long term, either. Clean water is really not to be taken for granted. Water pollution is one of the biggest problems worldwide.

The house is just a regular house with no sign or advertising. Iris fills her rooms by going to the bus depot every day and approaching tourists as they get off buses. That´s how we met her.

We share a bathroom with a French family. Two parents and two kids, ages 5 and 2 1/2. They are traveling for 3 1/2 months, on a route similar to ours. They have been to Peru and Bolivia too. It would be nice to be fluent in multiple languages like my mom is! The little 2 1/2 year old and I just say "hola" to each other. Yesterday we played a game involving pointing at pictures of animals. I say the name of the animal in Spanish, then she repeats it perfectly. She says the name in French and I try to repeat it. She corrects me and I try again. I´ll never be able to say horse in French. Then I point at the tiger and roar. She laughs, then points at the horse and says hee-haw, exactly like a donkey! I guess she must have seen some burros in her travels.

There is wonderfully hot water here, any time we want it. When we want hot water, we light the pilot light on the gas water heater. The water becomes instantly hot. We turn off the gas when we´re done, and the water is instantly cold again. I don´t understand how it heats the water so quickly. It doesn´t store a tank of hot water, as our hot water heaters do in the U.S. Some hotels have an electric water heater in the shower. It´s a device attached to the shower head. In my experience it didn´t actually work. But the gas one is great.

I uploaded our latest pictures, on Flickr. Just go to flickr.com/photos/kimigary and look at the photos for Antofagasta, Chañaral, Pan de Azucar and La Serena.

Hasta luego!