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Published: March 1st 2010
From Samoa we flew back to Auckland for 3 days, staying with Dave's extended and very friendly Samoan family and awaited our flight to Chile. We arrived in Santiago to a less than warm welcome. We had a couple of apples in our hand luggage, before we managed to eat them, they were discovered by a sniffer dog at baggage reclaim. For some strange reason, this meant that our rights were taken away from us and we no longer had the option of throwing them away at Customs or declaring them. We were taken to the interview room where we faced a $200 USD fine! What a welcome. Fortunately, in our broken Portuguese/Spanish, we managed to talk our way out of it and the sniffer dog handler took pity on us. After an hour of bureaucracy we walked out of the airport without a fine.
We got a bus into the centre of Santiago, and decided to stay in an area to the west called Barrio Brasil. It was a Sunday and the whole of the city seemed closed up. It looked dusty and sandy - with some beautiful old architecture in amongst some battered up 80's style buildings. We
found a great hostel called Casa Roja - it was an old Spanish style mansion house with a bar, swimming pool, open courtyards and a big kitchen. We settled in there for a few days, enjoying the cheap and good Chilean wine on offer!
The next day we walked into Santiago city centre - a thriving city, filled with atmosphere and edge. Some of the architecture was very european with old grand buildings with balconies and lots of detail. It's a busy city with lots of shops, mostly selling mobile phones, food and women's shoes! The most popular fast-food appeared to be home made ice creams and hot dogs smothered with guacamole. We decided to 'test' the ice cream - it didn't disappoint! We walked along the main pedestrianised shopping street to the main square - a beautiful park with a water fountain in the middle, and older men sat in a covered bandstand playing chess with one another. The square is surrounded by beautiful buildings; the city Cathedral, the old city Post Office and the National Museum. We felt that we needed to hide our valuables, but we didnt ever feel unsafe. Santiago is a really nice city,
dominated by the surrounding snow-capped mountains of the Andes.
The following day we took a bus to the city of Valparaiso 110 kms north west of Santiago. Most of Valparaiso was destroyed in the 1960 earthquake and was rebuilt with very little planning permission. It's built on the side of a hill, with a lot of the city overlooking the industrial looking bay. The buildings are all close together, and many are painted in different colours making it a bright and interesting city. We checked into a really friendly hostel and headed out to celebrate Dave's birthday! We found a great local restaurant on a side street, and ordered some food and a good Chilean red. Half way through the evening, we were given an impromptu belly dance by a local Chilean lady. From the restaurant we moved onto a really nice bar, and continued the celebrations with a few Tom Collins cocktails - the Chileans know how to pour a measure! There's a real night culture in the cities of Chile, with most people not eating until gone 10pm, and bars and clubs not filling up until 1am. Given this, it's not surprising that our hostel offered breakfast
until 12.30pm!
The next day, we walked around Valparaiso, getting lost in the alley ways, and winding our way through the cobbled streets. It's a colourful city, with a real mis-mash of architecture. In amongst the bars, restaurants and cafés, there's lots of artistic graffiti, and unfortunately lots of stray dogs (and poo on almost every pavement!). That evening our hostel manager George invited us to a club called Mascara. We went with some other people that were staying in our hostel (an English couple and a Colombian and Swedish couple). The club played English 80's music all night long - the Chileans couldn't get enough of it! The smoking ban hasn't quite hit Chile, and the locals are big smokers. Still, it was a great night.
Nursing a hangover, we got the overland metro to a town called Vina del Mar - 10 minutes north along the bay from Valparaiso, and regarded as the Monaco of South America. It's a town with lots of lovely beaches, some beautiful parks, and great shopping streets. It seems more affluent than Valparaiso, but it's still a long way from Monaco. It did have some really modern apartment buildings, nice hotels,
and of course the customary hot dogs and ice cream shops. After walking through the shopping streets to the town beaches, we stopped to try a hot dog, topped with guacamole and salsa - fantastic!
That evening we took a long-distance bus from Valparaiso to San Pedro de Atacama (in the north of Chile). For the 26 hour journey, we booked ourselves on 'semi-cama' (half bed seats). It was real luxury - big comfortable seats that reclined almost all of the way back, with food and drink offered at each meal time. For part of the journey we hugged the coastline, and could see the Pacific waves hitting the shores. As we entered the Atacama desert, we passed through some really remote villages, with people living in the dust of the desert in mud and straw huts. Surprisingly vineyards seemed to flourish in these small towns, and the only green we could see was that of the vines. There were mountains around us on some of the journey, and as we climbed higher above sea level, the clouds were at the same height as us. It was a really interesting journey.
We arrived in San Pedro de Atacama
at 12.30am. We put our packs on and walked through the dusty streets in search of a hostel. It was the start of the weekend, and San Pedro was packed with locals from all over Chile in search of night life. We hadn't booked a hostel, thinking that we could easily find one. We were wrong. We walked around until 2.30am with our packs on our backs, trying to find an available hostel - they were all fully booked. Fortunately the owner of a bar took pity on us, and called a friend who had a hostel slightly out of town. We booked in at 3am, and fell straight to sleep.
San Pedro sits in the Atacama Desert at 2,400m, and is a tourist mecca. It seemed a little artificial and didn't have the atmosphere of other towns that we'd been to in Chile. San Pedro is the jumping off point for many tours, which was the reason for us being there. Everything was overpriced, so we decided to cross into Bolivia as soon as possible. We booked ourselves onto a tour which took us in a 4 wheel drive through the Atacama Desert and across the border into
Bolivia. After 3 days of amazing scenery we would cross the largest salt flats in the world, the Salar de Uyuni. Our Bolivia trip had now begun!
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Parker
non-member comment
Hello
Hello chaps, nice blog - I'm still jealous, but learning to accept it. Hopefully this means that you're both safe and well, what with the recent orrible events in Chile. I suppose you must be some distance away from all the trouble? Parker