Santiago
Sunday November 26, 2023
Our time in South America is about to end. What an incredible two weeks it’s been. Mentally and physically exhausting, but experiences and scenery I’ll never forget. I’m looking forward to speaking English and my bed. I’m not looking forward to the cold and the dark.
After arriving in Santiago from Puerto Natales, we took an Uber to a restaurant near our Airbnb and I was pleasantly surprised at how good it was. I had been given a warning saying the food in Chile wasn’t that great so my expectations had been set really low. I think the only issue I’ve had with the food here is that they tend to prefer their proteins well done, instead of medium rare or medium. We spent the afternoon walking around La Moneda and the Plaza de Armas. I always thought that Latin Americans had late meals; since our lunch was so late in the afternoon, we only started looking for dinner at 8pm or so, and surprisingly some restaurants had already started closing. We did find this peculiar restobar named after Bill Clinton, and I had a traditional Chilean beef stew - cazuela de vacuno.
The next day, we covered pretty much all the remaining sights of the city. We walked to Santa Lucia Hill, Central Market (I found it awful and smelly, and I hate people yelling at me to eat at their restaurants), Vega Central and took the funicular to Cerro San Cristobal. We found a nice ice cream place near Santa Lucia and we got empanadas pinos from near Central Market. At Cerro San Cristobal, we walked around a bit but it was too hot to do much. We visited the Japanese Garden and had a nice view of the Sky Costanera. After taking the gondola and funicular back to the Bellavista side, we split for dinner. I went to this fine dining restaurant specializing in traditional Andean food with heavy emphasis on pre-colonial ingredients and techniques.
We had heard a recommendation for “a beach two hours away” from someone at the ice cream place and though no one thought to get the name of the beach, I knew he was talking about Valparaiso. It was on my maybe list, I didn’t think we would have time to visit but as I covered most of my list, and as the others seemed pretty keen on going, I told them to do some research and figure out how to get there. First step was buying a Bip Card for the subway, which was relatively straightforward, bar one question in Spanish I didn’t understand but did anticipate. Second step was going to the bus terminal and buying tickets. I wanted to leave the whole day’s logistics up to the others for a change. We tried to use the machines for one bus company but they wouldn’t work, so while the others lined up at the cashier, I wandered over to the other bus company and managed to get tickets through that.
The bus ride was around 90 minutes and took us through some of Chile’s wine growing region. Upon arriving, we went to a nearby shopping mall because we needed to use the bathrooms and didn’t want to have to pay for it at the bus station, and then we had to wait for Phoebe to buy a jacket because it was cold outside and she didn’t bring one despite Nancy nagging us to earlier in the morning. We split shortly after, I walked to the west side of town to check out some of the historic sights, the rest of them went to the beach. On my way back to the bus station, I went down to the water and saw a group of seals resting on a platform. Overall, it was okay, I don’t regret going to Valparaiso, it just wasn’t as amazing as a bunch of reviews had said it was.
We took the bus back to Santiago and transferred to the subway to go to Sky Costanera, the tallest building in South America. I was aiming to be there for the sunset and we made it in good time. For some reason, there was a capoeira performance happening on the upper deck of the tower, which was fun to watch. As the sun slipped behind the mountains to the west, the city’s lights flickered on. It was a nice way to spend our last night in Chile.
Posted by Jeremy at 10:54am on Sunday November 26, 2023 :: 0 comments :: 