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Hellooo :) sorry we've been absent for a while, it's a hectic business this travelling lark! Even though our adventures in Chile seem quite some time ago now, here's a little flavour...
The border crossing was a lot less dodgy than we expected, but I guess compared to the guy behind us who'd recently been deported from Ecuador and was now trying to bring a guitar made from a protected armadillo into the country, we weren't that interesting!
A sizeable amount of our time in Chile seemed to be spent on the inside of a bus, racking up a total of 56 hours travelling in about 10 days. Our favourite journey lasted 27 hours, involved the sad loss of all our fruit at a pest control checkpoint, the bus abandoning us and driving off with all our stuff (only to refuel apparently!), and looking at what felt like the same bit of desert for approximately 15 hours. We particularly enjoyed the compulsory video recording of all the passengers at the start of every journey - we could only conclude it was for identification in the event of an accident, nice and reassuring as you're trying to drift off to sleep! On one night bus there was even bingo for entertainment, and although our Spanish had improved we were a little reluctant to get involved - that and the fact you had to get up and sing if you won...
Our first stop in Chile was Arica, described in Lonely Planet as a quaint surfy/ urban town. Admittedly there were some surf shops around, but that's about as near to surfy or indeed quaint this place got. But hey, it provided a nice break in our journey down the North West coast. Needless to say we moved swiftly southward, to La Serena, a fairly average town, in the vicinity of a fairly incredible observatory. The area is renowned for having the clearest skies in the Southern hemisphere, so one night we headed out into the countryside, and said hiya to Jupiter, Saturn and the moon through the telescope! Got a bit excited when we saw the rings around Saturn, really clear images which looked exactly like they did in our old school textbooks. Learnt lots of interesting stuff about the Southern Cross and the Milky Way, much of which we've naturally since forgotten, but who knew that star signs actually correspond to constellations, and weren't just invented for the benefit of Glamour and Cosmo?! Most people apparently... Really enjoyable evening, and very different!
The quirky, multi-coloured town of Valparaiso was next, and by far our favourite place in Chile. The town was split into two parts, a busy working port and a steep hillside crammed with favelas, linked by rickety old fashioned vertical elevators. Every corner, wall and building side was covered in graffiti, some of which could definitely be described as street art, gaining international recognition. This, combined with the array of coloured roof tops, gave a real splash of colour to the town, creating quite a different impression than our first two towns in Chile. We spent a day walking along the seafront, and found another surprise this town had to offer - a group of 50 sea lions on the port, which provided a good few hours of entertainment watching these ungraceful animals attempting to jump unsuccessfully onto a platform. We stayed at Angel hostel, highly recommended to anyone visiting, which was really small and quirky, very suited to the style of the town. The sheer delight we experienced being provided with cereal and milk at breakfast made every penny worthwhile! Here we met our first bunch of English travellers, was nice to have a chat about tea and biscuits (Sarah found a fellow Yorkshire tea fan - an instant friendship was formed). To keep up a bit of culture, we went to the house where Pablo Neruda (Chile's most famous poet and Nobel Prize winner) used to live - he was a crazy collector, and made for a really interesting visit. We ended up staying here a while as we liked it so much, and spent most of our time wandering the streets looking at all the amazing art.
Santiago was, unfortunately, our last stop in Chile, as although we really wanted to get further South, especially to Patagonia, neither time or budget would allow, so we will have to come back! Chile's capital has a pretty bad reputation, even amongst Chilean people, and unfortunately Sarah had a bit of a taste of this, having her bag slashed in broad daylight - luckily the thieving scoundrel was no match for her security measures! We spent a fair few days here, enjoying some lovely sunsets over the buzzing plaza where we stayed, and attempting to avoid the slightly less lovely army of stray dogs and the general grey smog that covered the city (due to its valley location). An amusing tradition we were introduced to by a local was 'coffee on legs' - much like the name suggests, these were coffee bars where the baristas were dressed up to the nines in short tight dresses, heels and full make up! Needless to say these joints were filled with Chilean business men, much like the rest of Chile, which seemed to have an 80% male population.
For us, Santiago had one main redeeming feature - bringing the combination of wine and pineapple ice cream into the world! We spent a great sunny Saturday afternoon propping up the bar with some locals and a few Bristolians we met - who knew that topping a pint of scummy white wine with even cheaper ice cream and a moderate helping of syrup (pink for the ladies, and our friend Dan, and brown for boys) would taste so good! (Before anyone else has the idea to bring this revolutionary beverage to festivals and make bags of money, Sarah thought of it first!! Seriously.) Our other favourite day, and a completely necessary cultural experience, was our trip to the Cousino Macul vineyard. We spent the morning learning lots about how wine is made, and trying to look sophisticated whilst we pretended to taste, not guzzle and quickly top up, our wine. Then proceeded to spend the afternoon finishing off all the opened bottles of posh red wine, until we were politely shoved out of the door at closing time. Interesting factoid: it takes two kilos of rubbishy grapes to make a cheapo bottle of wine, and only one kilo of high class grapes to make a swanky bottle, apparently.
And so our South American journey came to an end! To keep you all up to date, we're now in week two of New Zealand, but a bit preoccupied with seeing and doing everything this beautiful country has to offer for blog writing! We'll endeavour to update you again soon....
Lots of love xxx
- comments
Jane Hirst Great stuff, highly entertaining, wish we were there! Carry on travelling, enjoying, blogging!