Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Would you find…?
Sheep, llamas, wild pigs, donkeys, any assortment of animals just wandering the streets in the cities?
People living quite happily in unfinished houses which they never intend finishing building? (they don't have to pay tax if the building is unfinished!)
The most beautifully landscaped and maintained roadsides and roundabouts next to deathtrap potholed roads and pavements in a country where you can eat a three course lunch for 70p?
These things about South America, amongst others, still continue to bewilder, confuse and amaze me!
I realise I haven't written a blog entry for a LONG time so I'm just gonna run through some places I've been to in the last few months. Unfortunately two cameras AND a memory stick have been stolen/lost in this time so I have virtually no photos of this time, you'll just have to believe that I was actually there and imagine what they look like… (I recently bought a bag of good luck at the witches market in La Paz in the hope that it will break this spell of losing everything I own!)
San Pedro
San Pedro is kind of a weird place, located in the middle of the Atacama desert, the driest place on earth, where it rains an average of about once a year! The town is tiny, you can walk from one side to the other in 10 minutes, and all the buildings are strange one-story huts that look like they're made of mud!
The main reason I wanted to stop here was to do the star tour. The Atacama desert is one of the best places in the world to see the stars and the tour is run by a French astronomer who made his own telescopes, and tells you a load of stuff about space, then shows you loads of cool things through the telescopes like Jupiter and mars, different coloured stars, lots of constellations, twin suns and really far away galaxies… and we saw heaps of shooting stars too, it was awesome!
We also managed to fit in a trip to the geysers the next morning before we left. Unlike the ones in the salt flats these shot up water not steam, but weren't as high or consistent, but every few minutes or so would start to spray water, which would build up and build up, then suddenly stop, then repeat itself a few minutes later!
We had a pain in the ass on the way to Santiago as we had to change in Calama and they didn't tell us that we were leaving from a different place than we arrived. So even though we had a three hour wait, and asked multiple times if we were in the right place, it wasn't until after our bus was supposed to have left that we asked again and were told 'Oh its already left, from the other terminal'! Needless to say we didn't get any money back and had to fork out ANOTHER £50 to get to Santiago!
Santiago
Santiago, what can I say? Obviously I love the city or I wouldn't have returned for a third time! No mosquitos or sandflies, no humidity, long, hot and sunny days all summer, its clean, its safe, it has great sushi! I ended up working in La Casa Roja for just over two months, and my Spanish did actually show a marked (although slow) improvement! Did a lot of cooking, chilling by the pool, partying til crazy times in the morning, being astounded at how cheap food was at the markets, drinking terremotos at La Piojera…
I did do some things which I hadn't previously in Santiago…
I visited the human rights museum, which is pretty morbid and shocking, but very interesting to learn about the mass killings and disappearances that took place under the Pinochet regime.
I went to a café con piernas (coffee with legs for those who don't know Spanish) for the first time thanks to Seba's new walking tour. A Santiago institution and pretty much like a strip club, but in the middle of the day, they only serve coffee, and the girls don't actually strip just wear bikinis or very revealing clothes. They are all in the city centre and the customers are mainly businessmen on their lunchbreaks. Apparently they were started during the dictatorship when there was a curfew so people couldn't go out at night, so they brought a bit of night time entertainment to the day!
Shockingly I hadn't actually been on a night out before in Santiago! This has obviously been rectified now, a lot due to the pubcrawl, which the staff get to do for free (thanks pub crawl guys!) and I've had some great nights out in Barrio Bellavista, and some really random ones, like when I ended up going to 5 different flat/house/hostel parties after the pubcrawl (don't know whose any of them were!) or when there was a Ricky Martin impersonator and I thought it was the real Ricky Martin…
Another one was when I was taken by some Argentinian guys to a party at a Chilean girls house (turned out they didn't actually know her, he was one of the guy's second cousins who he hadn't seen for 1 years!) who lived in the mountains, with an amazing view over the whole city, and I got a taste of how the rich people live!
There was also a sirt of arts festival going on for a while in Santiago, and we went to see a street performance of giant giraffe marionettes controlled by people on stilts, which were parading up and down the street with a woman singing opera and some smoke and fire.... I wasn't really sure what was going on but it was cool anyway!
I spent Christmas and New Year here. Christmas was spent with a big bbq and me working in the bar during the night, and for new year's we went to a roof party on the roof of the apartment block where a few ex hostel staff and friends live, where we could watch the fireworks being set off in the city centre. I was also here for Australia day, and we had another barbeque and a pool party which we bought lots of toys for like rubber rings blow up balls, water guns, which were great fun for a couple of weeks until they were all broken!
Of course the best thing about working in a hostel is all the cool people that you get to meet and work with, some of whom I knew before and went back to see (Leticia, marina, chuli, Tania) some of whom I've already met again! (Johannes, noam, marcel and albin, ary) and some who I got to travel with or am going to travel with again (desi and nick!) of course there's too many people to mention, but whether good or bad, (and it was mostly all good) all the people I met in Santiago, my time there wouldn't have been the same without you!
Pichilemu
Me and Desi just went here on a weekend break from Santiago to go surfing. It's a cute little town, but we foolishly weren't prepared for how much colder than Santiago it would be. Yes we were told, but being only three hours south of Santiago we figured it'd only be a few degrees, not 15 degrees colder! I did not pack appropriately… The surfing was really fun, the water was freezing (it comes up from the Antarctic) and we both realised how little exercise we'd done recently, I couldn't move my arms properly for about three days after! We found it hilarious that it was so cloudy and people were covering their faces in suncream, and denied it when the Argentinian guys in our hostel said our faces were sunburnt ('Nooo its just because we've been drinking…') but then realised in the morning that we'd totally cloudburnt our faces! All in all a very good weekend!
- comments