It won´t be long now until I stop saying hello in foreign ways. Knowing only few words in Spanish I have to make the most of them. Chile being chilly (ha) and Dublin expensive we´re moving off to Auckland a little earlier than intended. We can´t wait. Everything south of Lima has been desert, which we´ve seen enough of already, and we´re thoroughly glad we endured (full cama mind) buses back to back to get down to Santiago.
Santiago isn´t the cloudy smog hole we were led to believe. We´re having a bloody nice time walking around here. The Santiago Tourist Board or maybe some wiley Transition Year students created a map of the city recommending things of varying interest on 4 tour paths. We´ve done the Red path and considering some Australian has just put our name down not against our will for the Conchya Toro wine tour tomorrow, I don´t see us doing the yellow, green or orange paths. UPDATE: mixed certain alcohols the night before and couldn´t join Ciaran and Lisa on the wine tasting. Not to worry, we were on the world´s largest ´incline elevator´ that took us to the top of a hill which hold´s daily Mass sessions and a fantastic view of smog infested Santiago. Needless to say we got the first cable car off the hill which to Ciaran´s amazment didn´t transport us horizontally but vertically. Shocker.
Fish Market
We bumped into our old friend Oireann from Luton, who kept a steady supply of the best Caprihiana´s we´d had in Brazil, in our hostel. He´d already sussed out the Fish market and took us down there for lunch on Tuesday along with Kylie from Australia. I had the Calamari (rings of squid in pink water and garlic – wasn´t as bad as it looked).
Careful if you´re squimish, my calamari
Last night turned out to be Brazilian night in the hostel thanks to Oireann teaching us how to make caprihiana´s and revving the whole gang up with his odd collection of Brazilian whistles and drums.
Our 5 layer (not sure what the other 2 layers should be) dip went down a treat too!
It´s been raining quite heavy for the past 2 days now so we had to skip going to see Valparaiso unfortunately. We´re off to Auckland tomorrow night. It´s about 2 degrees warmer there now which should be very nice indeed.
Tchau, tchau chicas.
c
