As people always say - breakfast is the most important meal of the day. If it's wrong or non-existent then you're starting the day on a sour note. This is not what happened on our first morning at the hostel. Excellently scrambled egg served with fresh bread could not have hit the spot any more. We were still praying that the trip would be on still. We wandered just up the road to the pickup point and waited what seemed like an eternity. Nerves and thoughts of cancellation only kept multiplying throughout my mind. Nevertheless the bus arrived and picked us up - seemingly no cancellation.
Our guide was a wealth of information about the sea and the local animals. He got out a penguin leg and showed us how it bent! Upon myself asking the guide if there were any sharks and what the likelihood was of us seeing sea otters, he decided he was my new best friend.
We stopped off in the middle of the desert (but it had lots of greenness) and spotted some llamas. Naturally we decided to try and get as close as possible. Also naturally, they ran away. We stopped again not too far up the road so our guide could tell us about the flowering plants in the desert and the cacti. As we were walking back to the van we discussed football. I thought Alexis Sanchez would be a national hero in Chile and that EVERYONE would love him. Not the case, our guide - Jorge, was not a fan. He said he was too flamboyant and only wanted to dribble the ball. His favourite Chilean player instead was Aturo Vidal because he's a fighter, nice to see the often underrated positions not go unnoticed. After getting on the bus and starting to leave, we realised that the person who was sitting on the back row with us was missing... a guy from "Israel and Russia", a very shifty and bizarre character. We sat waiting in the bus for a couple of minutes before he suddenly appeared out of nowhere from behind some rocks - very bizarre.
Our next stop was at the port ready for our departure onto a boat. The waves were looking fairly large and seemed to rock the boat quite a lot. If this was deemed acceptable then I've no idea how bad it must get, the Pacific Ocean is a strange and powerful beast. We put our lifejackets on and embarked onto our tour.
After a while of conquering waves in our vessel, we neared an island. As we got closer we started to see more birds. What started off with cormorants (still pretty cool), then managed to progress into the jackpot - Humboldt penguins. We were told that there weren't too many at the moment as they were nesting. This made it all the better to see the total of five!
We continued to cruise around the island, inspecting every large rock and bay area in search of more animals. And more animals we found! Sea lions suddenly started to become the norm. Their fat brown bodies were relaxing peacefully out of the water and on rocks. They just looked like they wanted a cuddle!
More birds were spotted - many pelicans, before we found some very shy, fluffy water creatures. Of course this was the sea otter! We saw two of them swimming on top of the water, quite close to land still. The guide shouted out to me and the rest of the group that this was my favourite animal. A bit embarrassing and my cheeks very swiftly turned maroon.
We turned away from the land and headed no more than a couple of hundred metres from the land and waited. We were waiting for dolphins. Five minutes later and as if on call, six dolphins decided to bless us with their presence for a couple of minutes before disappearing and not resurfacing.
We had seen everything we were trying to see! Thus we headed to a nearby island to disembark and relax for a short while. Worryingly, we were told what to do in case of a tsunami... Not really had that before. Nevertheless, the beach was a very soft golden sand and clear, turquoise water pleased us as we relaxed on the island.
After the island we returned to mainland for some lunch. Lunch was quite pleasant until the dessert. They gave us each different kinds of ice cream. I was given quite an enjoyable coffee vienetta whilst Emma was given something rather odd and tasted strongly of alcohol (and not in a good way). I gobbled mine down without realising that Emma was looking on in anger and jealousy. She was quite annoyed when I turned to her after finishing mine and hadn't given her half of mine because hers was near vile - oh well.
On the trip back to La Serena I thought I spotted something in the desert near the road. It was being very shy and I couldn't tell whether or not it was a rock or a desert fox. I stayed watching it until we could see it no more. Just before then, it moved it's head - must be a fox. That was the final animal that had been described to us of things that we might see. An excellent end to the tour!
