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Published: February 25th 2013
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We arrived into Santiago after a long flight from Auckland with Lan airlines. We had a 6 hour delay in Auckland due to the grounding of the Boeing 787's. We were pleasently surprised with Lan the airline the staff and food were excellent. They even gave us proper cutlery and glasses which is not the norm haha. When we got to Santiago it was 4pm, this was 6 hours before we left from Auckland. So we went back in time apparently! We got a taxi from the airport to the happy house hostel which is in the barrio Brazil area. Our room was huge but one downside was that it faced onto a noisy road. We were starving when we got there so we immediately decided to head out and get something to eat. After passing a couple of restaurants and realising nothing had any English we had a feeling getting something nice might be difficult!! We ended up just getting some pizza as this was the only thing we could recognise from the menu but it was enough to get us through. We were both exausted come 9pm so we turned in. Unfortunately we were both awake by 1am thinking
we had slept for hours. This came to be a pretty common occurance over the next few nites! Oh how we love jet lag.
We spent our first couple of days exploring Santiago and doing the free walking tour. We enjoyed Santiago its very easy to get around on the metro. One thing we couldn't get over was the amount of stray dogs in the city. 4 million we were told by our guide, they even have some dog kennels in the park for them! The dogs even know to wait for the lights when crossing the road!
We decided to head out to Valporasio for a couple of nights as we had heard it was nice. We got our bus tickets at the bus station using some Spanish straight out of the phrasebook which was fun. The bus was lovely and it was only a short bus ride. We got a taxi to our hostel volante. Its a small hostel but it is run by a lovely guy who spoke good English and was very helpful with telling us where to go etc. The place is a maze of stairways and lifts. Again we spent our first
day walking around the town and checking out the different sites. There was also a bit of a festival going on so there were lots of people about and there was a few different things going on. We ended up meeting some lovely people sitting around the table in our hostel that evening, we met 2 Argentinian girls from Buenos Aires and a French guy. He spoke Spanish so was translating between us and the 2 girls it was so funny haha!
The following day we took the tram to the town of vina del mar for the day. We spent a couple of hours floating around the town and looking around the market before heading back. We cooked some dinner that night instead of heading out for dinner and again we met some more people in the hostel this time an Australian girl and two Americans who are living in Rosario in Argentina. Its great getting to meet so many people, with the hostel being so small its impossible not to end up talking to everyone haha but again we had a great night.
After our two nights in Valporasio we got some kebabs or schwarma as
they call it with the guys we had met the night before we got our bus back to Santiago. We decided to stay in la chimba hostel as it was reccomended to us by a friend who said it was amazing and also because it was in the nicer area of Bella vista. The hostel was really nice it was so big with pool tables and TV's everywhere! There area is really nice there are so many bars and restaurants within a block of the hostel so everything is on your doorstep. We went out for dinner that evening and ended up having some drinks sitting in the sun watching the world go by. How I love that saying haha!
Tomorrow we've got our flight to Punts Arenas in Patagonia.
Chat soon
Ian and laura
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