I arrived to Queenstown in the early afternoon and was able to pick up my rental at the airport, it was super easy! Walking out of the plane was so eye opening with mountains surrounding and snow on top, beautiful view, and crisp air (a little colder than Auckland). My new rental was a lot fancier than the last one (the first one was this Swift mid-hatch cute small car) and this one was a 2016 Mazda Start/Stop engine car where I didn't know how to work half the b...

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #000000; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} North Island I got seated in a window seat next to a larger woman in the middle with her friend or best friend or sister (i couldn't tell) but they were from NZ or AU because they had that accent. It was the first time I heard the accent and it made me happy. I was really dreading this flight and it didn't help that ...

There was traffic getting back into Santiago and didn't realize I would have to go to another terminal to meet Carito (she had bought bus tickets prior as she was worried they would sell out as it was the Chilean Independence Day week celebration). There were tons of flags everywhere, many people off work and a huge celebration all week with "fondas" festivals. I arrived with 10 minutes to get to the other terminal which was 10 minutes away so I was freaking out ...

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #000000; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} My first encounter with Valpariso was that it was much trashier than Santiago but once I got up to the nicer barrios, I realized why everyone loved this place. It's a coastal town set with hills and cobble stone streets, similar to San Francisco but smaller streets and steeper hills. The Uber wasn't able to drop my off ...

Santiago Chile I arrived in Chile mid-afternoon and the airport Wifi wasn't working properly, but thankfully was able to pull up an Uber. The app was getting confused on the time as it stayed at 14 minutes but didn't move, so something wasn't right. I asked where the Ubers were (since I knew this was a thing at airports, you have to walk away from the taxis and arrival drop off areas) as it is still illegal in most of the South American countries. I walked to th...