CHILE: Montt Blank

I'M AT: Hospedaje Leticia, $5, a family house with cardboard extensions out the back and upstairs. The room was mouldy and had three beds, two of which were lumpy. Someone had left a dirty winter jacket hanging up, stained with dry paint, and there was a watercolour of the Virgin Mary on the wall. It felt lived-in.

Puerto Montt is the departure point for ferries South - to the island of Chiloé, and to deepest Patagonia. I'd originally intended to get the ferry to Chiloé, which is supposed to be beautiful, unspoilt and - very rare for Chile - still populated by indigenous folk, or at least semi-indigenous.

But I decided by the time I got here that I'd had enough of the lake district. So, as it turned out, flying to Puerto Montt from Ushuaia was fairly pointless, albeit it took me to within shooting distance of Santiago. It turned out to be all the more disheartening because there's absolutely fuck-all to do here.

A short wander up the polluted shoreline, past begging women and geezers squeezing lager from brown bottles, in dewy grass, took me to Angelmó, which I'd read was a quaint fishing village. You could get a boat to a nearby island and have a picnic. Fair enough. I had ten hours to kill. But Angelmó turned out to be one short road, with really tacky crap being sold on one side, and a row of shady discos/strip joints on the other. And this was Sunday; even the bedraggled supermarket was shut. The only twitch of light was the market, fresh with slaughter, where successive narled women opened up their cauldrons, steaming with fish and pink sausage, asking me if I wanted to comer. I really, really didn't.

I took my time walking back and passed the rest of the day doing drab things in a drab town and drank a drab beer on the bus - before the conductor told me that I couldn't drink my drab beer on his bus.

This, at the very least, has the distinction of being the first time anywhere, in any of the countries I've been to in the last five months, that someone's stopped me drinking. I feared not a night in a Chilean cell, but a day back in bloody Montt.