To get you quickly up to speed in case you didn't know the plan to spend three months in South America touring Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru and Brazil, this will be followed by three months in Europe touring mainly France, Spain, Italy, Croatia and Greece, on the way home there will be a quick trip to Hong Kong.
Welcome to Caitlin and my blog, which will be our main attempt to keep in touch with everyone at home and share our experiences with you all, so here goes.......
We were not sure how much communication availability there would be in SA but so far we have had very good access to the Internet in our hostels and phone reception on our travel sims which has given us access to everything we may need, Facebook, Email, Viber etc....
CHILE
Our first destination flying into Santiago the capital city of Chile. Coincidently we flew on the same LAN flight as our friends Bec and Jess who are also travelling for 6 months but mostly on a different Itinerary. It was nice to spend the first day with them in Santiago.
First impressions, hot, smelly, dirty, busy city, stray dogs everywhere, toilets that don't flush properly what more could you want.... Im not in Cansas anymore would be an appropriate thing to say, we were in a new world. We battled away with our map, phrase book, guidebooks on a quest to discover the hidden gems of the city. We found some luckily.
 |
| Cathedral in Santiago |
 |
| SKM office Santiago |
 |
| Central Market in Santiago |
 |
| Checkers Santiago style, serious game and they drew a crowd |
 | ||||
The fish markets in Santiago
|
Epic dinner with Bec, Jess and Caity of course. Jess' mooing noises and charades to ask for steak, ensaladas and potata fritters at a very friendly restaurant was almost as memorable as the steak itself. Cait and I managed to order us some local vino to wash it all down. The waiters had the job of getting the diners attention three times in quick succession to sing happy birthday for three groups and share a cake, also memorable.
Spectacular view of the city and Andies mountain range from the "hill" San Christobal. Bustling fish, fruit and vege markets where pretty overwhelming in the heat of the day. The Chillian's really like gelato but I don't thing the craze of the upside down ice cream cone in a cup would take off in Austalia.
I took Caity along to visit the SKM office in Santiago where we met with a manager Fernando who I made contact with in Australia. Fernando showed us some of the office and explained some of the work that SKM does in Chile. Fernando was a very welcoming host.
Next stop was Valparaiso. A fascinating metropolis on the coast an hour from Santiago. Valpo is an old busy port from California gold rush days and pre Panama Canal.
The area of Cerro Conception is where we stayed, a beautiful part of town with narrow cobblestone streets, colourful buildings, seagulls overhead, cafes and restaurants around every corner. We loved Cerro Conception, hanging out in cafes with a beautiful view, eating local food, doing some sketching, looking at the street art which was everywhere, exploring the lane ways, stairs and other nooks and crannies. Our accommodation was on a stairway!
 |
| Stairway and cobbled street in Valpo |
We went on a tour to the Casablanca Valley to sample the local vino, the Valley has an incredible view of mountains ( not the Andies). The wine was rather delicious, one of the vineyards had lamas, chooks and vege patches which were able to be harvested by the vineyard workers for wool, eggs and veges to help them get by. We enjoyed learning about the history of Chillian vino and of course enjoyed sampling it. They are very proud of the local drop Carmenere which was thought to be extinct after the phylloxera wipe out across Europe but was rediscovered in Chile after it was thought to be plain old merlot, some cleaver dick decided the leaves of the grapevines shouldn't have red hairs on the back and got the vines DNA tested only to discover it was Carmenere.
We have discovered already the mighty powers of this continent, being stuck in Chile while waiting for the Chillian-Argentinian border pass to reopen after mudslides..... Eeek! We were very keen to move on to keep to our schedule as best we could. We finally got on our way and were successful at crossing the border. The mountain pass was 3000m, not enough to make you dizzy but quite cold and we got some spectacular scenery through the Andies. Some impressive feats of engineering, long tunnels, winding switchbacks and pipelines for hydroelectric power were impressive to say the least.
 | ||
Hydroelectric scheme pipeline in the Andes, impressive work, need some more time to think about how they built this.
|
Well now we are in Argentina, and let me tell you from first impressions we love the place and cannot wait to expore.
No comments:
Post a Comment