Activity Summary
Monday 30th October - Day 391 (continued)
Fly to Santiago
Dinner at Restaurant Japón
Luke now on the job hunt
Tuesday 31st October - Day 392
Metropolitan Park of Santiago
Cable car up to the top
Picnic on the hill
Costanera Center shopping
Wednesday 1st November - Day 393
Walking tour:
Plaza de Armas
Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino
Justice Courts Palace
Paseo Bandera
Constitution Park
Edificio de la Bolsa
Estación Universidad de Chile
Municipal Theatre of Santiago
Fuente Neptuno
Centre Gabriela Mistral
Coffee at the Centre Gabriela Mistral
St Lucia Hill
Thursday 2nd November - Day 394
Lunch at Ootoya - Ramen & Noodles House
Walk around Bellavista
Panam Games - Athletics
Friday 3rd November - Day 395
Travel to Valparaiso
Summary
Santiago
A really nice city that looks (in some parts) and feels like Europe. A nice change in pace, felt safe and had plenty on offer for food that satisfied a craving for variety. Very much enjoyed our chilled time here.
Transport
Santiago
Fly from Calama to Santiago
Turbus to Los Heroes from airport bus terminal
Metro to Baquedano
Walk to hostel
Accommodation
Santiago - Providencia Hostel
Number of nights - 4
Price per night per person - £18
Positives:
Massive hostel for social and food
Free coffee (if sneaky)
Private room and bathroom
Lovely hot shower
Work space, although freezing
Negatives:
WiFi wasn’t great
Smokers in the courtyard were a problem
Loud and sound travelled
Not enough blankets / duvets - it got seriously cold at night
Payment using debit cards incurring 19% tax was so whack but that was a Chile thing
Recommend?
Half and half
Diary
Monday 30th October - Day 391 (continued)
The flight to Santiago was short and chill. Landing in Santiago however was like hitting Europe. Clean, organised and with all the brands you expect to see, it was mighty refreshing.
Leaving the airport it was even easy to find cheap public transport to where we needed to go. The bus terminal was nearby and had buses running every 10 minutes tops right into the centre of Santiago for a paltry £2. We had to wait for the next bus in the queue but it afforded us plenty of space compared to the rammed one before.
The bus terminated at Los Heroes, a tube stop on the same line we needed and we really only stayed on as far as that because of our big bags. The traffic was a bit slow and it would have been quicker to get off earlier and underground sooner.
At Baquedano the sights weren’t all rosy. It was a large open main road with what looked like a mass of deserted buildings and nothing but graffiti for company. It all felt pretty run down and for the main area for hostels and backpackers we were a little hesitant. While the road never improved, our unease did settle and the area proved to be absolutely fine.
Near enough the first time in over a year, we had difficulty paying for accomodation. The quoted booking.com price said nowhere that paying by debit card would incur a 19% tax and that only by credit card would the advertised price be correct. Nicola’s physical Halifax was now hacked to sedation and all our others incurred fees so after 20 minutes of trying multiple cards and then trying online payments, we finally concluded AMEX was the cheapest method despite the 3% non-sterling fee. Such a faff.
Now in a city with plenty of cuisine to choose from we went straight to the first Japanese place we could find and could not wait to get away from grilled chicken and burgers. Dinner at Restaurant Japón was sadly meh, overpriced with terrible noodles but at least the sushi was good. The craving very much still lingered once we’d left.
Turns out supermarkets in Chile are very expensive. Every time we went we always came away monetarily bruised, usually from overzealous shopping and then claiming the price tag offers were wrong to soothe our surprise. Decent quality food (anything is compared to central and South America) but not great.
Our evenings in Santiago would be very chill, Luke now balls deep in CV writing, LinkedIn job searching and applications now that Nicola is all done and dusted. Does mean he now gets a free pass to have Nicola do absolutely everything travel wise, a well deserved break he doth declare after all his continuous hard work.
Tuesday 31st October - Day 392
Our mornings were always slow consisting of breakfast granola and Luke stealing coffee from the paid for breakfast in the bar.
Once out and about we journeyed over to the Metropolitan Park of Santiago, on paper a large park seemingly with plenty of walking routes but would find there was really just one plus some mtb trails. But it was a nice sunny day for the outing.
Rather than walk up the hill, we got the £2.50 cable car up to the top which had lovely views of the snow capped mountains that surrounded Santiago. Sadly there was a haze of pollution that is consistently trapped in the city which hindered the views but it was still pretty cool.
From the top we had a slow walk down which was predominantly on the road. Not overly exciting walking but it was good to have Nicola operating at 100% again finally.
Naturally she started breaking when she got hungry but we found a place to sit in the shade, open our fancy (by backpacking standards anyway) Brie, cream cheese, cold meats, jarred olives and fresh bread plus other accompaniments. One of the best lunches we can both remember for an age.
As Nicola was alive and healthy we pretended like it was her birthday so she was presented with Luke’s gift of an alpaca neck warmer that doubles down as a hat and that was the end of the celebrations.
Once done with our walk we went over to the Costanera Center for shopping. Luke was now short a pair of boxers courtesy of being swallowed by the last laundrette service so needed a replacement. To double down on this annoyance the place we went to in Santiago managed to lose one of his socks so is currently two for two on lost items, having not lost anything for 14 months.
The shopping centre was excellent, the largest in South America and we ended up splashing more cash than intended on warmer clothes for Nicola (the fear of cold is getting mighty real) and lame things like glue to fix Luke’s shoes.
The hostel kitchen was truly terrible, so small and people were unnecessarily aggressive in their use of the space so a simple pasta was again all we could bring ourselves to deal with.
Wednesday 1st November - Day 393
In our reclusive private room state, we completely missed the fact there was a Halloween party going on the night before. Nicola lays claim she would have considered going if she knew about it, of which Luke called bullshit due to our consistent aversion to these kinds of things. But it did keep us away until midnight before the riff raff were cleared out.
Thankfully our walking tour started at a reasonable 11am and it was a decent walking tour of Santiago. Politically much less spicy than the rest of South America, although the history of socialist rule, then being outed by a dictator to then be voted out willingly by elections was super puzzling.
The country is apparently much wealthier than its neighbours largely as a result of large copper and nitrate mines that it seized off of Peru and Bolivia in its war in the 1800s, in turn making its neighbours much poorer while capitalising on these reserves. Another turning point was the overthrowing of its dictator and returning to capitalism that fuelled its growth and why Chile seems more like Europe. The negative of course is that prices are so much higher than the rest of South America.
Plaza de Armas
Justice Courts Palace
Paseo Bandera
Constitution Park
Edificio de la Bolsa
Estación Universidad de Chile
Municipal Theatre of Santiago
Fuente Neptuno - part of St Lucia hill
Centre Gabriela Mistral
Once done with the tour we stopped for some coffee at the Centre Gabriela Mistral, Luke ate his packed lunch because Nicola was too scared and she carried on talking with the older couple that took a liking to her company. Not that they gave her any choice but they had infinitely better chat than so many travellers we’d met.
As we were so close we went back to St Lucia Hill for a quick walk around (it wasn’t anything special), hit up a nearby supermarket and walked back to the hostel via the Botero at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes.
Our evening was spent hostel chilling and Luke’s attempt at garlic bread being told half a bulb of garlic isn’t sufficient for the vampire killer that is Nicola Swain.
Thursday 2nd November - Day 394
Luke had a good CV writing morning that finalised that task and his LinkedIn profile. So. Exciting.
We managed to annihilate the Japanese food craving at Ootoya - Ramen & Noodles House, not through amazing quality of food but by sheer volume of portion sizes. The karaage chicken was decent (seriously lacking spice) but huge and then the ramen bowls were absolute behemoths. Nicola was served a katsu chicken that made her regret helping out on Luke’s starter.
A digestive walk around Bellavista would have been great had it not started raining with thunder threatening a savage downpour. So we ran away back to our room.
While in Santiago we found out the Panam Games were going ahead, essentially the Olympics for American countries from the US down to South America. The tickets for the athletics were a measly £10 so we thought why not. It started at 5.30pm and ended at 9pm.
The Estadio Nacional Julio Martínez Prádanos was easy to get to by bus and getting through to the stadium was really simple. The seats were first come first served so we chose a spot down by the 100m start line that gave us great views of the pole vault which was the most interesting competition of the afternoon.
The sports we saw were:
Pole vault
Women’s Heptathlon
Triple jump
200m finals
1500m finals
5000m women’s finals
4x100m semis and finals
The Chilean chant of ‘chi chi chi, le le le, viva CHILE’ being sung by predominantly really young teenage girls was entertaining. They all threw down hard for any Chilean athlete.
The standard wasn’t great and certainly nowhere near the Olympics, the US sending a B team and still cleaning up, but it was pretty entertaining to watch and be that close to the sports.
Once done with the games we walked back a while to get to a metro stop and then back to the hostel, Nicola on edge while walking but it was hard to see anything happening where people are predominantly walking pint sized rats in coats and whippets.
Friday 3rd November - Day 395
Our morning consisted of complaining about our ratchet neighbours who always seemed to come back screeching just as we were about to go to sleep, and get some calls in with recruiters and some interviews.
Not overly exciting downtime the last few days but the progress in life post gap yah’ing has been solid.
After a nacho lunch we were on the metro to Pajaritos and the 3.05pm Turbus to Valparaiso. There are a number of companies all running the same service, it was just a matter of picking one that had space and ran the earliest.
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