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Published: March 30th 2011
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We flew on a LAN night flight into Santiago airport. It was a good journey where Dan made full use of the free red wine! We landed bleary eyed and were quickly through customs and immediately faced with our new challenge – the language barrier! Between us we know very little Spanish and South American’s on the whole, speak very little English! We eventually worked out that we needed to catch a bus and the metro to get to our hostel on the other side of town, and with lots of pointing at maps and the help of a Spanish to English dictionary, we eventually made it. It was the middle of the afternoon and lovely and sunny but we were feeling a bit spaced out due to the jet lag (well we had flown back in time 16 hours!) The afternoon and evening was spent mainly sitting in the hostel garden under some pretty grape vines, making the most of the free wifi to have long overdue Skype sessions with our families (seems our families might both been getting puppies soon!!) and finally getting our New Zealand blog and photos up online. We went to bed that night after the
longest day of our life and slept for 12 hours solid – a pretty good achievement in an 8 bed dorm with very squeaky floor boards!
After a free breakfast at the hostel - something that luckily seems to be the norm in South America, we ventured out. Santiago is a huge city of nearly 5 million people, and to get a feel for just how large it was, we headed for its highest vantage point – Cerro San Cristobal (869m). We caught the funicular up the hill and were rewarded with great views from the top, although the smog was pretty intense. We could only just make out the enormous Andean Peaks that surround the city. The Blessed Virgin Mary statue was impressive and it was really tranquil up there, although it seemed a shame that they had built a telegraph pole right behind the statue! We decided to walk back down the hill, which proved to be a very dusty and steep track. Chile, on first impressions seems incredibly dry; the Rio Mapocho River was almost running on empty! Back in town, we found a pretty courtyard of cafes and market stalls, so stopped for a coffee
and chocolate brownie. It felt like such a treat to be able to afford to do such things again after all our hard scrimping and saving in Australia, Fiji and New Zealand (and Chile is one of the more expensive South American countries – we can’t wait to get up to Bolivia and Ecuador where we can afford to eat out all the time again!) We spent the afternoon wandering the streets, exploring Centro Artesanal Santa Lucia market and sitting like the locals in the Plaza de Armas. We self catered in the evening and were particularly pleased to find that we could buy a half decent bottle of wine for less than £2!! We found out during dinner that Barack Obama had been in town giving a speech at the Centro Cultural Palacio de La Moneda and we’d missed him! Shame. We enjoyed the local red wine and chatted and swapped travelling stories with our roommates until late and then tried to go to bed. Seems we weren’t yet over the jet lag as we both really struggled to fall asleep until the early hours of the morning.
We awoke late the following morning and enjoyed another free
breakfast before we set off to find the bus station to book a ticket to travel to Mendoza the following day. Our basic Spanish had already improved enough that we were able to buy our metro and bus tickets without too much difficulty. We decided that the best way to see Santiago was on foot, so we walked the 2km back into town along the very busy Avenue O’Higgins. There were lots of little green parks which had water fountains (although they were nearly all lacking the water part!) We stopped to take photos of the Palacio de la Moneda and briefly visited the Centro Cultural Palacio de la Moneda (where Obama had been just the day before) which contained some nice photography and local crafts, including a tapestry of the Chilean miners that were stuck last year (see photo). We also spent some time in the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino which contains some incredibly old ceramics (4500 years in some cases!) along with textiles and Chinchorro mummies. On our walk back to the hostel, we caught an outdoor elevator into the Cerro Santa Lucia, a really pretty park right in the centre of town. Again we enjoyed the
views of the surrounding city and had a slightly clearer view of the Andes today – no signs of snow capped peaks though. There was a really pretty water fountain called Terraza Neptuno – complete with water! Our third night at the hostel was once again spent sipping cheap good Chilean wine under vines with the other backpackers. Two of our American roommates were at the end of their trip so the hostel owner was cooking them a huge BBQ feast – it was a really friendly place and made us realise how much prefer smaller homely hostels than the big chain ones.
We slept better that night (possibly the red wine, possibly the miles of walking we had done or possibly we were just adjusting). At 12pm the next day, we caught a 7 hour bus to take us through the Andes and into Argentina to the city of Mendoza. Santiago is a cool city, very polluted – our noses haven’t stopped running, think they miss the clean and freshness of NZ!
We’ve been doing all our blogs country by country – our route in South America is going to see us border hoping a fair bit
so the blogs should be getting shorter and more frequent (yey I hear you say!!)
More from Chile coming soon.....
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