What a relief to finally arrive at our first scheduled destination. Caught the metro into town which was easy enough. It’s clean and efficient and they have a ‘bip’ card which is similar to the Oyster card in London that you can use on both the metro and buses. If Santiago can have a system like that, why the hell can’t Sydney? We actually haven’t used our ‘bip’ cards much as we’ve mainly been walking for miles each day, but it’s a convenient and easy system.
When we arrived at our pre-booked hostel, The Green House, we were greeted by our friendly host who was a lovely old man. He had minimal English, we had even more minimal Spanish, but we all managed to understand each other. The hostel was nice and cosy and quiet, and in a great central location. Exactly what we needed after two days travel to get there. Didn’t do much our first afternoon, just wandered around to have a look and had our first Chilean hotdog. A very unexpected thing to be popular here, but the Chileans are mad for them. The basic one is fairly standard, just a regular hotdog in a bun with mustard and tomato sauce, but you can go all out with others that have fresh chopped tomato plus shitloads of avocado and mayonnaise and varying combinations of these. Then we grabbed a 6 pack of the local Escudo beer for AU$6 and chilled out.
After all good intentions of saying we’d get up at 8am the next day, we slept in til almost 11am. Clearly we were feeling the effects of travel and caught up on some much needed sleep. But we didn’t just laze around all day, as we spent the next 5 hours or so walking around the city. We went to find the central market which was fresh seafood, fruit and veges so that was an assault on the senses. We wandered the streets checking out some awesome street art and were impressed with how good it is. At Cerro San Cristobal (San Cristobal Hill), we caught the funicular up to the statue of the Virgin Mary, which had a perfect panoramic view of the city of 6.6 million people. It’s quite a smoggy city but that’s because it’s in a valley in the middle of the Andes. We were then on a mission to find a particular restaurant that Anthony Bourdain went to in his show ‘No Reservations’, to sample a lomito. After about an hour of wrong turns and back tracking (we were determined not to give up), Kurt finally spotted it down a side street. With a bit of help and patience from our friendly waitress, we managed to order our own tailored lomito’s. It’s basically a pork sandwich with various toppings. Keryn had avocado and mayonnaise, and Kurt had the same but with sauerkraut as well. We’ve posted a picture on Facebook (as well as other photos from Santiago and Valparaiso) which actually doesn’t do it justice. The cost of two lomito’s, one coke and one beer was about AU$22. While this is hopefully the dearest lunch we have in quite some time, it was worth the money and the many kilometres walked to find it. We rewarded ourselves with a few more beers that night and chatted to a Dutch couple who had just arrived at the hostel. They were at the end of their 6 months travelling around to see the 7 World Wonders, with the last one being Christ the Redeemer in Brazil. They said Macchu Picchu in Peru was one of their highlights, so it’s made us look forward to that even more.
On our last full day in Santiago we decided to do one of the free walking tours, which wasn’t so free as our guide told us the average tip is AU$10-$20 per person. It was good though, as we saw a lot of the city that we hadn’t already been to, including the changing of the guard at the Presidential Palace and coffee with legs which are coffee shops where coffee is served by women in short, tight dresses to (mainly) men standing at counters. We also walked around Barrio Bella Vista which is the student area and location of Pablo Neruda’s house, who was a famous Chilean poet. One thing we’ve noticed while walking around is the diversity in Chileans – Chinese, people of middle eastern appearance, Africans, blondes, redheads, native Mapuches. It’s brilliant, and we’ve both been wrong more than once in assuming someone was a European tourist when they’re locals. Kinda strange to hear a curly haired ginga/ranga speaking Spanish.
The next day we got a bus to Valparaiso, which is a city on the coast about 90mins from Santiago. The population here is about 265,000 people, so it’s noticeably smaller and much more chilled out which is exactly what we were after for a few days. Most of the city is on steep hills, accessed by funiculars which are all about 100 years old. They still work fine though!
We stayed on Cerro Alegre (Alegre Hill) which was the main area for tourists. We stayed for 3 nights and spent our days walking around the city, and went for a longer walk to the next city around, Vina del Mar. We were there on a Sunday so not much was open but it was a beautiful seaside walk and we got our first local bus back to Valparaiso. Oh, we did see a moai (human figure carved from rock) from Easter Island outside the musem in Vina del Mar. It wasn’t as big as we were expecting, but still quite cool as it’s the closest we’ll get to Easter Island. Again, there’s a lot of impressive street art in Valparaiso, and there seems to be quite an arty community. If you ever find yourself in Valparaiso, DO NOT stay in a place called Hostal Color as we had our first, and hopefully last, experience of bed bugs. Not cool at all, and we’re still experiencing the psychological effects, thinking we can feel things crawling and biting us. Needless to say we were happy to leave that hostel, but we still really enjoyed Valparaiso. It’s a great place to spend a few days just walking around and doing not much. We then caught the bus back to Santiago and killed a few hours walking around, and we’re currently waiting for our overnight bus to Pucon, which is a small town of 21,000 about 10 hours south. We’ll let you know what it’s like!
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