Hostal Patricia Valparaiso

... Some describe it as the most ordinary of his homes. We had seen his home in Santiago and agree that La Sebastiana is much more conventional. Seems like Neruda had a bit of OCD, as he was a great collector of things. Not just valuable things such artwork by his friends Picasso and Rivera, but ordinary things like paper coasters from English pubs from around the world, or colored glassware. In his study he kept a life sized picture of ...

... by terrifying dogs and standing in the snow. Obviously some hassle is expected but it was all a bit silly and Tiago wasn´t very happy bless him.

Back on the bus and past immigration the views were incredible. The Andes seem even more huge than the Rockies and the Alps - they probably aren´t, but they seemed so much closer and jagged than any I´ve seen before. The snow was fresh and the sky was clear blue and both Tiago and I were itching to get out and take some ...

... once I leave on Saturday afternoon. I've grown very fond of the room and will be sad to leave it. I fell asleep early on Thursday night after chatting, uploading, and showing pictures to Jenny and then studying for my grammar test.
My test went fairly well the next morning. I knew most of the answers and only missed a few questions. I picked up flowers after my grammar class and took them home over lunch to give to Margarita. She cried when I ...

And so it was with a heavy heart that I travelled into Chile knowing I was on the final leg of my South American adventure. However, it was during my final 10 days or so in SA that I met some of the loveliest people of my entire journey and had some of the strangest experiences of my journey so I suppose I ended it well!

I must admit that I didn' really enjoy San Pedro de Atacama. After 3 days of desert on the Salar de Uyuni tour ...

... we arrived one followed us around the hill for about half an hour - we hadn´t even stroked it or anything! One we affectionately named Bowie on account of his different colour eyes, but then we saw one with completely white eyes which actually was the devil and rushed us like it was going to kill us, so we didn´t like that one so much. In Valparaiso we went to the beach, went up the hill in an acensor, saw a tiny museum under the main ...

... ice creams, a little quiet life! :) Once Danna back in Santiago, I still had a morning there so I went to Pablo Neruda's villa in Valparaíso (he had 3: Santiago, Valpo and Isla Negra), called La Sebastiana. It's a beautiful villa, very well decorated, with an incomparable view of the bay. Sadly pictures are forbidden... After that the only thing left was to go back to Santiago to prepare my departure to the South. But I will go back to Valparaíso, that's certain!

Dinner last night was at one of the many cafes near to 'La Casa Roja', where I was staying. I grabbed an 'un completo' (long hamburger bun with fresh salsa, beef, sour cream, cheese, tomato sauce and mustard) and jugo de naranja (orange juice), which cost 2100 pesos (about $6). I went to have a nap when got back to the hostel, but ended up sleeping for hours. This was lucky because most of the people in the hostel were out partying ...

... we were not going to miss.  We arrived at the airport at 4am, got our boarding passes and waited....it turns out Peru had one last surprise for us :)  We hung out until close to boarding time, then went through security quickly to find that we had to pass through immigration again to leave Peru ...

... off! We caught a collective which is an unregistered taxi that works like a bus. They have numbers with specific routes on their roofs and when they are filled they leave and instad of $2 for the ride its 20cents. Thanks to Alberto we knew what number collective we needed to go to Sebastiano (the biggest problem as a tourist to use collectives..we cant tell which is the "right" one) anyway... Sebastiano is the name of the Valparaiso ...

... Fortunately my SleazyJet flight was delayed by 3 hours so I still checked-in on time!)

The journey to Vino del Mar took about 15 minutes; we looked around the centre of town for a short while and then headed towards the sea.



We crossed some pretty rivers on foot and were glad that we had such ...