Santiago

---

Arrived today morning in Santiago after long flights. Luckily all legs of both our flights, me from SFO and Rahul from ZRH, worked out. We were able to take public transport, bus and then metro to reach our hostel Providencia. Its a nice hostel with good amenities. First order of business - get Bolivian visa. This turned out to be as easy as people say. We left the hostel at about 12:30, and embassy closes at 1:30. We reached there just in time, and it literally took 20min to get the visa stamped.

Fee - none

Questions asked - none.

We have already had a change of plan and decided to take more time in Bolivia, skip stargazing in San Pedro. It just does not seem to fit the plan with Christmas time being hard to travel around. So bought rather expensive one way tickets from La Paz to Santiago, with plan to start Bolivian travel with Uyuni salt flats tour.

Day 2:

Today we got up quite late, getting over all the tiredness from flights. The breakfast at hostel left much to desire, it was simple bread butter and fruits. Then there was big task of repacking our backpacks for the hike which took more than an hr. It was almost 1:00 by the time we were done with that, and we had to get money exchange, lunch and then make it to the walking tour starting point. We made all of that. Getting money exchanged in the central area gave us good rate. We found a interesting place to eat. We had a Chilean style salad with rice and a pizza. The pizza was deep dish and quite good.

Then it was off to plaza de armas to catch the free walking tour. We really like these in every city. The tour was quite good. Took us to interesting places with some history as usual. We will definitely go back to some of the places we saw. The day ended with a nice veg crêpe at Bella vista.

---