Finally in Santiago!

I really thought we had this travel thing down pat. Derek and I often travel long distance and, while it is never a delight, it is also never too straining.

This journey was completely different and actually left me feeling pretty ill and completely exhausted. When we got to our hotel, Derek still wanted to go for a coffee but I could barely manage a shower before passing out on the bed. After four hours I woke up with a cold, still-too-tired-to-think head and hungry. Not a pretty combination.

We eventually ventured out for food. Derek was desperate for steak – this is South America after all. We found a funky little street near the local university that was packed with restaurants and people on a Friday night. Obviously everything was in Spanish which neither of us can say more than 10 words in. It was after we ordered what we hoped was steak and fries that I regretted not using my time before the trip wisely to get to grips with basic Spanish. After dinner we crashed again for another 12 hours sleep. Travelling is hard!

 

In the next few weeks we are going to be travelling in and out of Santiago a few times. Being in the middle of Chile it lends itself to being a good travel base. However today was the only day that we really had to explore the city.

It was definitely not an early start. At one point during the night Derek actually thought I had died and that he would have to lug a body around like something out of Weekend at Bernie’s.

We decided to have breakfast at a Colombian place that served really strong coffees. I still felt pretty ill so we made a quick stop at a pharmacy with both us miming coughing and shivering to indicate that I had a cold. The game of charades looked silly but worked… although I think the pharmacist was only willing to part with some paracetamol.

We first decided to tackle the queue at the funicular going up to the Cerro San Cristobal – an 800m hill overlooking the city. The view was good but could have been spectacular. Santiago suffers quite a bit from smog. So much so that later in the day when the wind had cleared the smog a little we noticed some of the giant mountains that surround the city – something that we were completely oblivious to when we were on top of the lookout on the biggest hill in the city.

 

 

We walked down the market streets and through the centre but were not very impressed – perhaps we were too tired to enjoy it. We instead decided that cocktails would do the trick. We had a dinner reservation at 8… this was at 3pm. The plan was to drink cocktails until it was time to venture out for dinner. At about £3 a cocktail it would be rude not to.

We decided to walk to dinner via the Cerro Santa Lucia, a mini little hill outcrop right in the centre of town. Walking through the trees up the path was genuinely enjoyable and both of were surprised how pretty it was. Santiago is not a very pretty city, but we both decided that this was the nicest place we had seen today.

I reserved dinner about two months ago at a restaurant I read about on a Guardian blog. It was first a wine bar with about 400 bottles of wine to taste and then a restaurant. I was in heaven! The first problem though was the lack of reservation; they didn’t seem to have ours. I could not believe it! At least we arrived slightly early, so they managed to seat us at a table reserved for later that evening. Both of us ordered a flight of wine tastings from different regions of the country. Derek was really looking forward to visiting a restaurant that he was comfortable enough to order the ceviche and he was not disappointed. Ceviche, empanadas and Chilean wine… now we were in South America.

We are both looking forward to venturing into Patagonia and Antarctica now.