Santiago Part dos - San Cristobal

---

Following our earlier jet lag interrupted couple of days, the next day we were determined to finally do something productive, and with this in mind we got up “early” for the first time in South America (9:30am, as we’ve said many times, it’s a tough life on the road!) scoffed down some of the free breakfast on offer and went back to the room to procrastinate for a while. Eventually we made it out of the room in time to head out to the highly recommended Bellavista suburb for some lunch before tackling the San Cristobal hill that looms over the city. Thankfully the weather was good and it seemed to be a lot less smoggy than the day before. We were accosted on our way along one of the roads in Bella Vista by what I will call a ‘posh beggar.’ She stuffed a small piece of paper into Matt’s hand as we were walking, then stopped us, rapidly talked to us in English but slipped back into Spanish in the middle of sentences and then asked us for money to pay for her university fees. Seriously, why didn’t we think of that in Sheffield? We gave her the equivalent of 40pence. I hope she was grateful.

After completing our usual trick of looking at EVERY menu on offer in the area we settled on a place called Dublin (authentic sounding eh?) A thing that most places offer to get customers through the door is a “menu of the day” which is basically a 3-4 course lunch for roughly the same price as a normal main course ... however after having a competition of “who knows less of the other persons language” with the waitress-lady (a competition that we won, but it was close) we finally, somehow came to the understanding that the beef main course on the menu was sold out (or “never repeated” as she put it), somewhat putting the mockers on our lunch plans (another interesting story eh? How come Cate gets all the good bits?) I don’t think so...the stuff I write is just as dull! So we sat down to look at the menu and choose something else.

The waiter soon came over and asked us (in Spanish) what he could get us, at which point Cate made a ham-fisted attempt at asking in Spanish if there was another drinks menu (I’m not knocking her, we’re both terrible at it) and after letting her stutter and splutter on in increasingly bizzare Spanish for a few moment the waiter turned to her and said “you can just ask me in English if you like”. I liked him already! He was a cool waiter...he kind of took the mick out of me over and over as I tried to speak to him with as many phrases as I could in my terrible Spanish, well, when in Chile, why not practice?! He’d come over to us and start to speak really quickly in Spanish, using his hands to gesture knowing full well that we wouldn’t have a clue what he was saying, or he’d answer my question in Spanish in the same manner, wait for us to look totally baffled, then smile cheekily and explain to us in English what he meant. Funny man. We tipped him...(but not much, we’re not that minted.)

Anyways, we shared a pizza for lunch and then headed off to find a route up to the top of San Cristobal hill for a view of the city, having been told it would only be a 30 minute walk to the top. After one false start (we took the path to the zoo rather than the path to the top) we found what we thought was the route to the top, a road that was signposted “Virgin Mary” as there is a huge statue of her at the top. After we’d been walking for 30 minutes or so and hadn’t seemed to make much progress up the hill we realised that we probably should be on a footpath somewhere rather than the vehicular access ... but being too stubborn to turn back we ploughed on regardless and carried on up the hill. An hour and a half after setting off we were still trudging along, gradually getting nearer the summit as cars and taxis sped past looking at us like we were lunatics. By this point Cate was really struggling and needing a drink, taking pity on her I foolhardily offered to piggy-back her the rest of the way to the top (assuming that she wouldn’t hold me to this) ... luckily I was saved from a 1km piggy-back session as almost immediately a car that was passing stopped and offered us a lift. Well, they were talking Spanish, but we assumed they were offering us a lift, so we got in their car muttering “mucho gracious” over and over again.

Our good Samaritan Chilean buddies dropped us at the top of the hill and we bid them a fond farewell before noticing where we were and being blown away by the view of the city before us. They were very kind and I got to practice my phrase “What is your name?” in Spanish to their little boy, who actually understood me. And even though he didn’t ask me what my name was, I thought I’d practice telling him that anyway.

At the top of the hill, there was a huge white statue of the Virgin Mary that overlooks the city, made in Paris and weighing 35 tonnes. It was quite spectacular but I think it was probably just pipped to the post by the shear vastness of the city that we could see. We had pretty much a panoramic view of Santiago which was incredible. There were high rise buildings in the foreground, with even more that must have been really big but looked so small in the background. There were buildings everywhere, green patches of lands and the final thing we could see was the mountains. They were immense. There was a church at the top of the hill and other religious statues and along with religious background music, it once again made me feel very spiritual and very gracious that we have been able to travel around the world to see all of these fantastic sights. I said a quick thankyou to Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travellers for keeping us safe - thanks momma hen for my Saint Christopher keepsake, it’s in about 5 pieces now but I still have it and I also bought a metal Saint Christopher keyring from their gift shop to replace it.

Matt made a new friend while we were sitting at the top of the hill. There are plenty of extremely long legged stray dogs dozing during the day in the streets of Santiago, a bit like in Asia, but one decided to come up to Matt and literally attempted to climb on top of him to rest. It was very amusing to watch but I draw the line when he tried to kiss him on the lips. Whatever were you thinking Matt? Haha, the dog tried to kiss me actually ... who can blame it?! We stayed up on the hill to watch the sunset and the city slowly light up with cars, streets and buildings all slowly switching on as darkness descended. Once the sun had finally set we headed off to make our way down the hill and back into the city beneath us. During our time up on the hill I’d scoped out the proper footpath back down to Santiago, but on the advice of a friendly Chilean in the gift-shop we decided that it would probably be best to take the funicular train instead of walking down the footpath. What sage piece of advice did he dispense that brought us to this decision? Well ... “I cannot recommend the footpath, it is getting dark and there will be assaults on you” at which point he mimed pointing a gun at me and continued “what can I say, not my fault, we are Latin Americans” ... great, footpath it is then! The funicular is an ascending and descending cart on train tracks and as we went to buy ‘dos boletos’ (two tickets) a man was busking with a guitar then asking for money from people. I decided there and then that if we were asked for money I would sing half a chorus of ‘God save our gracious queen’ and then stick my hand out to him for his money. Unfortunately he had stopped and disappeared by the time we got over there.

We landed back into Bellavista and it would’ve been rude to leave Chile without having a drink or two so we headed off to a really cool complex called Bellavista Patio which is basically shed loads of bars and restaurants in really gorgeous courtyard surroundings, where we indulged in some ridiculously cheap happy hour Pisco sours whilst pondering whether we were hungry enough for another foray into Chilean cuisine. After deciding that we were, we wandered out to one of the restaurants on the street that we had seen at lunch time and took the plunge, hoping it would be a better result than the previous day’s lunch at the fish market. Staying away from the fish menu, I opted for fillet steak (surprise surprise,) mash and salad, whereas Matt went for the casserole beef with spicy mash. The meals were very tasty and filled us up quickly, however it seems that in Chile, they have the habit of refusing to take your plate away if you haven’t finished your meal; maybe they are surprised that you wouldn’t. I don’t know but we spent a long time waiting around for them to clear our plates and get the bill. We meandered back to the hostel to blog for a while and then went off to our dorm to sleep - another night of having trouble getting to sleep unfortunately.

So after another night of patchy sleep we rose late again before skulking off for a shower and packing our bags just in time to get downstairs for our midday checkout time. We’d booked ourselves a bus ticket across the Andes and into Argentina for that night, so we had one more day left to enjoy Chile ... first things first, lunch! As you can tell we didn’t do much except eat and (sporadically) sleep in Santiago, after our time roaming around the countryside in New Zealand it was nice to have some down time again, it felt like being on a little city-break holiday rather than the start of a six weeks travelling around another new continent ... just what the doctor ordered! Anyway, I’m sure no-one wants to hear even more details of the foods we’ve been gobbling down, but suffice to say it was lovely again (I’m gonna tell you anyways, crab ravioli in a pesto sauce for me and a mammoth smoked salmon, spinach and potato salad for Cate). As we sat out on the Parisian feeling street, we were serenaded by Charlton type music by one man playing the guitar and other playing the violin. They were really ace. We then spent our final afternoon in Santiago wandering around the handicraft markets, taking a butchers at the Presidental Palace and generally mooching around ... oh, and we bumped into Stuart from our Fraser Island trip on a street corner too, it really is a ridiculously small world sometimes.

Santiago is completely not what I expected, not that I really had any expectations of what it might be like, well maybe I thought it would be less well developed than it actually was. It is an absolutely huge city, with huge numbers of people in it, being the capital of Chile it is probably hardly surprising. It has some really pretty looking buildings, lots of open spaces (plazas and parks) with many benches provided for people to chill out on and all of its roads in the CBD allow one way traffic only. It has roads which look like pavements so it is easy to step out and get yourself knocked down and numerous places selling hotdogs. There is street entertainment and police walking round or on horseback in uniforms carrying guns and parts of it really reminded me of a cross between New York and Kuala Lumpur. It is a city that I fell in love with...I could have quite easily spent much longer there but we needed to get on with our travels so we could fit everything in.

So anyway, that was the end of our travels in Santiago. Next stop: Mendoza.

Cate and Matt xx

---