I had a weeks work to do in Castro so I found a neat little house to stay in with good Internet at the Hospidaje Familiar under the watchful eye of Orfilia and buckled down.

Castro was a lovely place to spend the week, brightly coloured houses gripping the side of a steep slope leading down to the sea, one of the last enclaves of the Spanish in South America. My hospidaje was a funny old place, it was above one of this bars where scantily clad women served beers to drunk sailors up until 11pm sharp when it would close it’s doors. The noise would be quite loud upstairs but I didn’t mind, it had character.

In the port of Castro there are little eateries that wait for either tourists of fishermen to be snapped up from the adjoining pavement. I ate every day in the fresh fish stall where they make up cerviche, crab, muscles, piure, anything that comes from the sea all fresh as can be, the crabs still moving a moment before eating, lashings of lime, onions, hot sauce. I don’t think I have eaten so healthily in a long time as I did that week. There is one thing that a diminishing budget does which is to enforce regular and minimal meal times!

The island looks incredibly like The UK, perhaps Devon with it’s green grassy maritime slopes. I took a few excursions about the place staying a night in a village called Dalcalhue, around half an hour from Castro on the bus. I was looked after by a lovely family in a house just near the rodeo stadium. Go to the entrance of the stadium and pass it to the right, about three houses up on the left, doesn’t really have a name.

The work I was doing was to re-build a few websites for a client, they were Joomla websites that had become so outdated that simple PHP upgrades by the hosting company were grounding the sites, so I updated them to run on Joomla 1.5 instead of joomla 1.0. It was simple work, just time consuming, so I was glad to have finished. Next stop Purto Montt.