Back To Wine

Since entering Argentina over a month ago, Mandi has gradually been getting more addicted to the South American wine. First it was the Argentinian variety that she loved, but then as we moved into Chile, she found that the wine from that country was even more to her liking. However, on Easter Island, she found that it wasn´t as easily available and instead was forced to revert to her second favourite Chilean drink - Pisco Sour. Therefore, although sad to leave Easter Island, she was very happy upon our arrival in Santiago to once again indulge her new found love of the local vineyard products. Admittedly, this is a pretty poor introductory paragraph to our Santiago section of the trip, but I couldn´t think of anything else to fit BTW - I´m blaming my recent lack of sleep.

If I could only use one word to describe Santiago, it would have to be "huge", or maybe "enormous" or any other word that describes something really, really big (I don´t have a thesaurus to hand). The city is home to 90% of the Chilean population and when flying in or out, all you can see below is city stretching out in every direction until it reaches the rock walls of the snow capped Andes mountain range. The city itself is nice. It is modern, has several large parks, many nice buildings and of course has the benefit of being very close to the Andes and so is surrounded by wonderful natural scenery.

On our first day in the city we went to the Cerro San Cristobal, a large park near the centre of the city that contains an 800 metre mountain on top of which sits a statue of the Virgin Mary. The park is easy to get to and, thanks to a funicular railway, is also easy to get to the top of! From just near the statue it is possible to get fantastic views back over the city and a quick cable car ride across the park takes you to a fantatsic swimming pool - something that was very welcome in Santiago´s 30+ degree temperatures.

The rest of our time in the city was spent organising ourselves, initially for our trip to Easter Island, and then on our return, for our trip to Peru and Northern Chile. We did manage to walk around the city a little bit, taking in the Provedencia and Barrio Bellavista sections of the city along with the centre itself, but unfortunately never had time to explore much further. Santiago is, however, definitely a place we would like to return to in the future and see more of, and it is a shame we haven´t had chance to do so on this trip. We will, however, have one further day in the city when we return from northern Chile and hopefully we will be able to see one or two more things before our flight to New Zealand. I think a tour of the local vineyards is already top of Mandi´s agenda...

Steve