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Published: March 1st 2008
Lara and I landed within about 5 minutes of each other in Santiago airport with her coming from Auckland and me from Toronto. My connecting flight from Montreal had been an hour late meaning that I had had to sprint from one side of Toronto airport to the other to make sure I got the flight. Luckily I did and then we sat there for ages as the other people connecting from my flight casually made their way onto the aeroplane as if they had all the time in the world! Typical!
It was nice to arrive to the sun in Santiago - its quite a change to go from -20 to 30 in one day! We got to our hostel - an amazing old house with swimming pool and swim-up bar so it was quite a luxurious introduction to backpacking in South America!
On the first evening we went for dinner with a friend of mine, Charlie´s flat who has moved out here to teach for a couple of years. Her flat had an amazing view over the Andes as the sun went down. Santiago is surrounded by huge mountains, some of which still have snow on them
La Casa Roja´s swimming pool
nice relaxing start to the two months in South Americaat the end of the summer!
After a day relaxing by the pool and trying to get over jet-lag for Lara (who had travelled over 16 time zones), we spent Weds seeing the sights and then booked ourselves to catch the Pachamama bus going South into the Lake District. Our first stop yesterday was Pichilemu, a coastal town with a black sand beach. It was quite a touristy place, but i took a surfing class in the afternoon which was good and ended up translating the lesson for another Pachamama English traveller.
After a long 12 hour journey yesterday, we arrived late in Pucon, a place where you can do loads of outdoorsy stuff. The original plan was to climb an active volcano but it has been raining and they think we might not be able to. So we are just waiting to see whether we can go rafting instead...anyway watch this space!
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