Kent stayed at home and slept and Carol went out with Beth and Grassa, her friend, to a beach about an hour away by car. When we parked a man came over and Beth had to pay him 4rs just to park on the ordinary road. This is common throughout Chile, Argentina and Brasil, these men are like the mafia, if you don`t pay them then who knows what may happen to the car. So everywhere you go and have to park, just on an ordinary street, a man will come over and demand money from you. They do nothing usually, just take the money, I thought it would be for watching over the vehicle or helping to back in or out or something but no. This guy just took the money and when we got back to the car he was nowhere to be seen.
The beach was long and had two names but one end of it was called Itaipu, like the dam. It was golden sand and fairly wide, restaurants had set up umbrellas on the beach with chairs and tables and we sat at one of these in a big group of other tables and chairs and umbrellas. Carol went for a dip in the ocean, it was just the perfect temp to cool you down a bit and as the beach is on the east coast and not in the harbour the water was clean. The gradient of the sand into the sea was quite steep though and the waves a little rough but only close in.
We stayed about half an hour then headed further up the beach to the end called Itaipu. Here the seafloor was shallower for further and it was nicer to swim. Here another man collected money for parking, this time it was 5rs (NZ$1 = 1.2rs) if this happened in NZ either no-one would go out or the man might get beaten up himself, it´s a shocking extortion.
Next we went and looked at a third beach, all the beaches were lovely and lots of people were there enjoying them as you can see in the pics.
After the beach we went to a friend of Beths who has done her house up with christmas decorations and lights. It was very pretty and we stayed and chatted a while before heading on home.
