Stranded

It's Tuesday and we're stuck in a fancy hotel in the middle of scrubland. We've got practically our 1st views of the snow capped Andes - but the mountains are some distance away.

We cycled 10 miles yesterday, incredibly gently, from incredibly windy Rodeo. Pob's knee is still grissly despite throwing our precious bikes around in the bottom of a few buses and 2 days enforced bed-rest in Rodeo after a poisonous ham and cheese pizza.

There are worse places to be stuck. The hotel is built around an indoor thermal bath complex - fluffy white dressing gowns, optional treatments, that kind of thing. The smart restaurant serves fittingly health-conscious food, but you can still get a greasy steak if you ask nicely. It costs about 5 times as much as our usual hostel, but thankfully they take credit cards, especially important because yesterday the Rodeo cashpoint was out of cash.

The next town is 25 miles away - currently unbikable but with buses leaving daily at 4am. We'd just got our heads round this to book tickets when the concierge remembered that it's a national holiday tomorrow, for the national census, so there's no bus til Thursday. So two more days of lazing about for us. Hopefully some supporting thermal water will do Pob's knee some good.