(¿Don’t you just love the upside down punctuation marks at the start of sentences?)

We are in Puerto Natales, a little Chilean town wayyy down South. For reference, its approximately 900km further South than the bottom of Tasmania. Add to this that yesterday was summer solstice, and you have very long days. The sun tends to set around 11pm and there is still some light at about 12:30 which feels quite strange.

Tomorrow we set off on our big hike around the Torres del Paine national park, Time Magazine’s ‘greatest hike in the world’. We’ll be away right up until New Years Eve (also known as Nick’s Birthday), so this is our last chance to say merry Christmas (‘feliz navidad’ over this side of the world) to everybody! In fact, by the time we get back the new year will have ticked over in Australia, so we should probably throw in a “Happy New Year” too!

Thanks for following our little blog, its been fun to update and we love looking at how many hits we have received on a given day/entry. The last couple of days have been quite funny actually. I’m not sure what has changed, but for some reason we’ve become visible to a whole heap of automated web crawlers and bots who have been posting these ridiculous comments. We allowed the first one or two, thinking someone reading might find them amusing like we did, but we’ve had at least 50 over the last couple of days so we’ve started deleting them on mass. Some of the messages deliver believable enough compliments or accusations “gotta hand it to you, there’s some good stuff here” or “dude, check your facts”, but others are ridiculously targeted and miss the mark entirely:

“Except the military and police are part of the 99%. It may work initially, but eventually they will also turn on their corporate masters”

(I cant imagine which blogs that comment would apply to…). We’ve also had some touching stories about how Hunderburton Adventures has changed people’s lives, a shout out to Alex Weisinger who wrote to us

“It’s the season of giving so I actually have a gift for you since we really love this blog. You know, in the last year it has really made an impact in our lives and dragged us from financial despair to living a very comfortable life.”

What can I say, you’re welcome Alex, it’s been a pleasure.

¡Chao chicos! More posts to come in the new year!