Santiago, Atacama Desert & Peru

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Well we spent a full day in Santiago, basically doing a blitz sightseeing tour of the city, laundry and even a movie. I spoke of Santiago briefly in my last blog entry, but we had not fully explored the whole area at that point so I will add a bit more information regarding what we saw. We visited the presidential palace, and managed to catch a glimpse of their troops putting on some kind of nationalistic display, marching around in front of the royal building, with stray dogs chasing away the renegade pigeons so they were not to bother any of the trumpeters.

From there we delved further into the city center and enjoyed all the pedestrian walkways about town, these are quite something actually. Basically they are roads where they no longer allow vehicles. I quite liked them even if it gave the illusion of being in an outdoor shopping mall, speakers mounted everywhere played the soft melodies of Lionel Richie and other spectacular hits. Police were everywhere making sure nobody was up to any wrongdoings. We found a park where you can climb up this cool rock via an elaborate system of staircases and see in full view the splendid city panorama. The smog was quite prevalent which sucked but still well worth the walk. There were all kinds of churches and old buildings that were marvelous along with cool alleyways that reminded me of Gotham City in my favourite Batman movie. Highlights included getting our laundry done, and hearing this choir in one of the churches sing, which sounds quite lame but was actually really breathtaking. I mentioned we visited the dirty coffee bar where all the waitress serve you in underwear and provide you with pleasant conversation while you sip on their delicious concoctions.

The food was not that great in Santiago, maybe one has to visit a fine seafood restaurant, we did find some pretty good pasta which was great. Our last night there really sucked though because we had to wake up at 7:30 for our bus up north to the Peru border but sometime around 6:30 am these idiots in our room that came home drunk, it was actually quite bad, they weren't just loud but actually trying to piss us off, so after some arguing and tense moments they finally passed out, thankfully an hour later we woke up and made so much noise they re-woke, but then just passed out again, so we threw all their bags around the room and made a general mess of things so they would be pleasantly surprised when they rolled out of bed to find us checked out and their crap everywhere.

The bus ride north to Peru was long, hours and hours travelling the Atacama desert, but not really being able to explore it at all because we simply drove through it. It was really cool though, enormous sand dunes and endless desert (to the east) as far as you can see, all the while rolling pleasantly along the shores of the pacific ocean (to the west). The area turned out to be quite valuable as Chile defeated both Peru and Bolivia for the territory because of the mineral deposits and what not. We finally got to our last stop in Arica near the Peruvian border, where we hired a man in a crappy car to take us across the border with a Belgium guy, thankfully there were no problems with that and we managed to catch a bus on the Peruvian side up to Arequipa.

Peru is great so far, the city of Arequipa has a delightful city center near their town square with old buildings, cafes, balcony's and warm weather. We have explored some of the town, and tomorrow we plan to visit the national park and canyons north of here. Peru was not exactly as I expected, I thought it would be much more like Bolivia and as it turns out it actually reminds me a lot of Mexico... The language here is great though, I can understand almost everyone really well, conversations with cab drivers and bell hops, no crazy accents like the Chileans and Argentinians. Today Jord and I did some shopping around for bus tickets, tour information, even some souvenirs, more delicious meals at the cafes and errands. Nothing overly interesting or hilarious to report on at the moment mainly because we have spent so much time in buses.

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Photos

Peru!
Shot of the flag, and the internet cafe I wrote this from. Sunny weather, pleasant people, well worth the days and days spent on buses.

Dune
City of Iquique (I think) taken in the Atacama desert in northern Chile.

Palace
The palace in Santiago, picture taken during a regular Tuesday morning display of Nationalism!

Pigeons
Pigeons in a Peruvian Park.

Comments

[Taís]

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I found your blog ! Now I will always write here! Take care with pingeons because they are dangerous... You can get a terrible disease from them... Take care, please! Best wishes, Taís