Santiago fly by

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I forgot that I had written this one ' no photos taken this time either....its the entry before the previous one.


I got out of Puerto Natales eventually and got on the bus to Santiago Chile. Never does my lack of preparation of knowledge of where I´m going or the route I´m taking show up more than when I´m about to set foot on a bus. Here was I thinking that i was about to take a bus north up through Chile to Santiago with the added bonus of passing an exploding volcano in Chaiten when in fact the bus headed south back into Argentina and went back into Chile near Bariloche so I had another billion argentinian and chilean stamps in my five page visa that was already full of a batch of them + phoney stamps from Antarctica so now I was down to one and a bit pages. The reason, it appears, for the roundabout route is that the bottom of Chile is not conected by road to the rest of it. You could catch a boat but that would have been a bit pricey and it was fairly close to the previous two week passage. The journey was once again fantastic and I didn´t mind passing through Bariloche again as it was beautiful. There was a stop over in the middle of nowhere for about 9 hours - I can´t remember what it was called but I didn´t do much there bar internet and eat. On the night leg of the trip we pulled off the main road onto a slip road to pick up passengers. I was absentmindedly looking at a group of four or so youths who were loitering at the entrance of an underpass (are you old when you use youths and loitering in the same sentence?) Anyhow I was musing that if we were at home those guys would definitely be hoods up to no good but naively or because I didn´t want to ascribe western judgements on them I didn´t think much about it. I continued musing when the tallest started walking towards the rear of the bus, along the lines of if those guys were hoods then that guy would be the alpha male and that the others would start following him soon. Which they did but as I was only musing and it was late I thought no more of it until I saw all four or five of them hightailing it through the underpass weighed down with luggage one of which was a backpack with camping equipment. Needless to say I woke up from my useless musing and struggled to get my shoes on to get off the bus and see if it was my mochilla which had been nicked as it looked like a dead ringer for it. The bus guys wouldn´t let me check the hold and there was pandemonium for a while . The cops showed up about 15 minutes ater and tore off looking for the ladrones but there was little hope. However they suprised everyone by returning about ten minutes later with the bags. Thankfully it wasn´t mine so I could breathe easily as it held the police report of the previous report so it would have been like getting triply shafted.
I arrived very early in Santiagos monster bus/rail/shopping mall complex and got rid of my backpack in lost luggage and did what I do best which is heading out into the city without a map and went for a walk for a few hours . I was giving the Couch surfing thing ago and was waiting for a reply from a Santigoan journalist to confirm she had a place but as It happened she didn´t and I ended up staying in a decent hostel called sams place or something and hanging out with a bunch of friendly folks there for a while. I didn´t get up to a whole lot here . Santiago probably could have borne a lot more investigatio than I put into it but my highlights there were Pablo Nerudas ship themed house and a night out seeing how Chileans party to Santana. As it happens it seemed that we partied more and I had a great night out dancing my ass off to the ancient guitarsmith. The guy knows how to play and it was such an unexpected treat that everyone was in great form after it. The fact that it cost under 15 euros to see him was a major boon considering how much it costs to see anyone of his calibre at home. I had managed to get a trip to Quito by plane for a reasonable price and the plan was to get there in plenty time to be sure I didn´t miss my forthcoming trip to the Galapagos.

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