Santiago

Country number 16, Continent number 6

Well we are in the home stretch now, but still lots of time to enjoy in South America! We arrived in Santiago, Chile after an incredible travel day! I say day since we left Australia on the 16th after sleeping in the airport from midnight till 3am when we checked in for our flight to New Zealand, took a 5 hour flight to NZ, stayed overnight and headed back to the airport the next day at 445pm on the 17th and set off in the air for a 12 hour flight. We then transported back in time to noon on the 17th when we landed in Chile. So as you can imagine the jetlag was and still is a little rough. We thought we had it all figured out and we would just stay up on the 17th till that night and sleep the night through to be right as rain the next day, however, after a walk down the street and an empanada, we crashed hard at 3pm and have been trying to sleep the whole night through ever since.

Our first proper day in Santiago, we wandered the streets to check out the architecture, sights, sounds and smells. Once again we have entered the land of friendly, smiling stray dogs. As we stood at a cross walk – mental note -pedestrians do not have the right of way and now cars once again drive on the right side of the road – which way to look! Eeek – two puppies came up beside us and waited patiently for the light to change, the one puppy even looked to the side and there were no cars coming so he walked along the crosswalk to the other side, the other puppy was not quite as brave and waited with us. The funniest part was as they crossed in the pedestrian cross walk and reached the other side, they turned at the next crosswalk and waited for the cars to pass before crossing again. Absolutely hilarious to watch, like a cartoon show and in my head the dogs spoke Spanish! Hahaha

Now the only problem with exploring Santiago on a Sunday afternoon is that it is a ghost town. Most businesses are closed and the streets are empty. We stopped for lunch and discovered that once again we were in the land of cheap beer – 1 litre of beer for $4! The weather is now quite chilly and tshirts don’t quite cut it anymore, hopefully it warms up soon or our 2 long sleeve shirts are going to alternate daily. The city of Santiago is great, clean with lots to see and plenty of culture. The Spanish influence is obvious and monuments and statues line the parks and sit at street corners. The people are fantastic, quick to smile and eager to chat, even though they don’t speak English and our very, very limited Spanish makes conversations difficult. After a couple days we headed to the wine region of Mendoza in Argentina on an overnight bus. 5 star compared with the Indian buses, the seats had loads of leg room, we had a movie in English with a plug for your headset above and a great little treat. At 1am we arrived at the border and out to wait in the chilly mountain air as they scanned our bags and searched others. We made it back on the bus and set off for our arrival in Mendoza at 4am.