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Greetings from Santiago!
So this is the final blog from South America, on this adventure at least. Five weeks have flown by faster than a pidgeon on steroids and I cannot believe that in just a few hours I will be on the plane to New Zealand. I first arrived in Chile on Monday after a serious bus ride from Lima to Tacna (a little border town in Peru.) I had obviously picked up some bad karma in Lima because I was sat next to the most obnoxious child I have ever fantasised about hurling out of an open coach window. After two solid hours of screaming I upped and moved myself to the only free seat left - next to the toliet, where the attendant took pity on me and brought me drinks and pillows. A few sleeping pills and dreaming that I was a marshmellow later I arrived in Tacna. When you get off the bus, especially as a gringo (a white person) you are bombarded from every angle with people screaming "lady" "taxi" "hey lady" and you have to scurry through trying not to get lasooed into a waiting car and whisked off on some overduly expensive and roundabout route. I went over the road to the international terminal so I could sort my entry papers for Chile and was scooped up by a Collectivo (basically a big taxi which you fill to the brim with people and bags) driver. On wandering out to the carpark with him I was squeezed into an Oldsmobile that wouldn´t have looked out of place in the early seventies and taken to the border along with my fellow passengers! The border was so simple, they make it easy to cross over here (with the exception of the triple border down in Argentina!). A few stamps and more Oldsmobile later I was in Arica Chile!
Arica is a lovely, relaxed border town. There are excellent beaches and surf so it attracts a big tourist and surfer crowd. I only had one day here so I wandered down to the main street and had a relaxing afternoon walking around and popping down to the beach. That evening was spent watching Dr Phil with an Irish girl whom all the locals called Ola (her name was Orla!) and teaching a spanish boy about how amazing Dr Phil is and that having people air their dirty laundry on TV is simply the most fantastic thing ever!
The next day I was on a plane bound for Santiago, my last stop in South America! On arriving in Santiago I met up with some more Irish (recurring theme?) lads that I had met in Cusco, ironically at an irish bar. That evening was spent drinking real pints (with no head!) and making friends with a lovely bunch of girls that are studying for a year at the university over here. Their house reminded me so much of being back in Reading - with fixtures that don´t quite fit, a bathroom tht is never quite dry etc. I decided to head home at three which was made rather difficuly because Cilian ate the address of my hotel but luckily the taxi driver humored me by driving to every exit of the Santa Ana metro until I found my hostel. Once back abd a little worse for wear one of the hostel managers fed me toatsed cheese sandwiches, water and more beer! The next day I spent with the crowd from the day before - we got to see the university (which is huge!) and went out in the evening to a student night which was great fun - good music and cheap drinks. Unfortunately right at the end my stomach has finally given in and I have been subjected to the most horiffic cramps and have developed close relations with bathrooms all over Santiago. So I struggled clubbing but partied until the lights came on anyway (god bless Boot's own remedies). Today I was mean´t to go the the beach with the same crowd but having woken up shocking late and spending a lifetime repacking my bag I checked out the Plaza del Armas Instead and I am so glad that I got to see some of this city - It is so beautiful and so clean! I went into the prehistoric South America museum where there were the most amazing displays - the ancient tribes here used to hunt sharks and whales with nothing more than wooden spears and canoe-like boats! And they mummified their dead in the most bizarre fashion, by removing all the soft tissue from the body, reinforcing the skeleton with sticks, packing the whole thing with clay and painting it black and then sticking the remaing bits of human skin on top. It is believe that they used them in religious festivals or displayed them - ewww! Of course I checked out my final South American Cathedral! This one did not dissapoint, it was far more tasteful than most, with lovely pastel colours and less idols than normal.
So now it is off to New Zealand where I will hopefully be able to find some work and save to travel further afield in Asia! People say that you learn so many lessons when travelling, I think that this is half true for me. I feel that this adventure has confirmed what I already knew about myself. I have definately become more confident, I don´t mind eating alone, I make friends with complete strangers, I wander around foreign cities where everybody speaks a different language and I have been fine; infact I have been better than fine. I have throughly enjoyed myself. I know that I am still scared of birds and still nowhere near being able to conquer it, I still like my own space, I prefer cocktails over beer, I like speaking my own brand of odd, disjointed spanish, I love chatting to the locals and the tourists alike and I will still wake up early (even after a big night out) to get to that museum first! I definetely will not miss people screaming "lady" at me, I will not miss cheese (honestly they eat cheese for every single meal here - for a while I felt like a vegetarian at hanibal lecter´s dinner party until I gave up and started eating cheese) and I will not miss the way animals are treated. I have enjoyed learning a new language so much that it is something that I will persue further; how fantastic to be able to converse in another tongue. My time here has passed so so fast but I know that it is not a question of if I will ever be in South America agaian, but a question of when.
Until next time in Nz!
Charli xxx
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