18 to 23 March
We arrived in Santiago at around 8pm, getting a van from the airport. This made our first South American experience easy. We had been traveling for around 30hrs, driving from Vegas to LA, waiting at the airport from 5pm until 2am, flying to Panama, waited again then flew down to Santiago.
Saturday, we awoke after a big sleep, grabbed a late breakfast at Cafe El Naturalista before heading to Plaza de Armas, to join a walking tour. It turns out that Chile has extended its daylight savings to assist in reducing their current energy crisis, unfortunately Apple didn't know this so we spent the morning running behind time! Luckily we could join the 3pm tour. So we went watch shopping, kitty found a watch and we went through the famous fish markets and markets on both sides of the river.
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| Start of the walking tour - Plaza de Armas |
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| Presidential Building |
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| An older building - only the good ones survive the earthquakes! |
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| Modern Santiago architecture reflects the old aross the city |
The tour took us all around the city and our guide gave us some really interesting history on the city and allowed us to get our bearings. We finished the tour near Pablo Nerudas house, near the uni district around 7pm and grabbed dinner, tasty local dishes of meat and beans.
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| Cerro Santa Lucia - park in the middle of the city |
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| Gardens in Cerro Santa Lucia |
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| Green Building |
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| The buildings are very cool, people waving for the photo! |
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| This was built to look like a mobile phone and charger. |
On Sunday needed to do some washing and blogging so we set off to do a load. The laundromat was very modern with TVs and wi-fi but was expensive, separate loads will do that! Obama was in town and we heard protest marches and jet fighter planes overhead, the sound setting off many car alarms. Lawrie went in search of somewhere to upload photos, trying 6 places (we now know the SD card picked up a virus or two somewhere!). Lawrie gave Kitty some dodgy directions and without good Internet access, maps or phones we didn't know where eachother was. Eventually we met back up a our hostel, a little grumpier than before.
The museums in Santiago are closed on Mondays so we spent the day walking around and up both of the hills to get some exercise and enjoy the views. It's a pity that the air was so polluted as this detracted and limited visibility. We did see some positive steps like LED lighting, green buildings and a plan to clean up the river.
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| Cannon on Santa Lucia (which was once a fort) |
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| View of the Santiago skyline |
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| A modern take on the ¨green¨ building |
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| The park is right in the centre of the city, popular at lunch time for snogging. |
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| The water features get filled up in winter, to stop kids swimming in them. |
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| Lawrie in front of a man made waterfall. |
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| Looking down the Ascensor up Cerro San Cristobal. |
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| View back to Santa Lucia |
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| On a clear day the views would be amazing. |
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| Rio xx looking back to San Cristobal |
On the walk down Lawrie found a watch on the trail, nobody was around so we'll call it a freebie! We had the largest meal ever in Providencia, a well to do suburb. Kitty got worried when the waitress said that she´d bring a plate to share Lawries order of Fajitas. This took us a number of hours to finish, with some local beers to wash it down.
Walking back we followed park beside the river until the police moved us further away. We saw more and more police then heard a few people saying that Obama was coming. Eventually we saw a couple of big limosinses and Lawrie saw Obama in he back of one!
Tuesday we started out at the Museum of Pre-Columbian Art, the works were all beautiful and you could really see the evolution of the same theme through time.
After the museum, we walked to Pablo Nerudas house to do a tour, which luckily, was in English. He led a very interesting life and had a very eclectic taste in furnishings. While he loved the sea, designing his houses with nautical aspects (including a sloping, creaking floor to mimic a ship rocking at sea), he didn´t spend any time on the ocean. His poetry, political life& death are all important aspects of Chilean history. Kitty bought a copy of one of his poetry books.
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| Pottery Totem |
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| Beautiful & so detailed |
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| For smoking use. |
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| Very detailed! |
That night we headed to the uni area again to grab some dinner and beers. Kitty started a conversation with the table next to us, meeting Acsa & Jon in the process. They are locals to Santiago, so we spent some time chatting about Chile and life in general. Acsa was heading to Valpariso to do a diving course on the weekend, so we planned to catch up for lunch.
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| Jon & Acsa |
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| Us at the bar. |
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| New friends, dinner over! |
Wednesday we awoke feeling very dodgy and caught the subway to the bus station, luckily the Valpariso bus left straight away & we had no issues getting there!
