Eurotel El Bosque Santiago

... gave you 2 tastings and a glass for your entry fee.....I´m determined to keep both glasses but not too sure how that will go consider I´ve broken most fragile things i´ve bought so far!!!<br>Then a final meal with Ali who´s on a speed mission to get down to Patagonia and back to BA in a couple of weeks so its unlikely we´ll catch up again in SA. ......bye Ali its been good travelling with you!!<br>

... 8211; Empanadas (so good)!The 2 girls the lads had met were tagging along with us, their names were Fran &amp; Hanna so yeah was very funny trying tell which Fran people were talking too(not).<br><br>All the shops would all be the same on particular roads , so u would get clumps of Bureau de change shops, car part shops etc so that was annoying trying to find supermarkets and all.<br><br>There is so many stray dogs around that we decided we would bring a pet dog called Scrappy on ...

... to enjoy the weekly pasta dinner, also prepared by Charles. We exchanged emails with Wayne and co. and agreed to meet Friday morning at a stop on the metro line to head to Valparaiso. <br><br>Following a quick hour bus ride to the coast, we were in Valparaiso Friday morning in time to pass through the mercado central where the farmers were displaying their freshest fruits along with other goodies. A block away, we watched the local fishermen setting up their ...

... city to be empty. We could not find a tourist information or even a travel agency. Every hotel we went to was a complete dive, and our standards are getting pretty low. Chad was convinced that we would get murdered in our beds. So we made the painful but necessary decision to trudge back to the bus station, and board an 11 hour overnight bus to San Pedro de Atacama. Urgh. San Pedro was a very touristy little town at high altitude ...

... different way, the favourite being to purchase the required chapters online and print them off. The next couple of days were very lazy and we decided that the stress of selling the van in the previous week was also taking it's toll. We amused ourselves by chatting to other guests or taking short walks into the city to idly look around some more. We also found a few bits of information in the Lonely Planet guides in the hostel. We decided to ...

... I was gazing at the incredible mountain chain - the andes - up to nearly 7000 meters the mountains where appearing right next to the plane ... Soon after we passed the highest of these mountains we were starting to descend to Santiago, what reminded me of the narrow valley landing in Innsbruck I experienced a long time ago ...

After Mendoza, feeling a great deal hungover, it was off to Santiago, th capital of Chile for a few days. Luz, who was on a hiking trip with me in Huarez in Northern Peru had very kindly agreed to give me a kind of guided tour of the city and the neighbouring port city of Valparaiso which I had heard good accounts of from other travelers. So we spent about 5 days touring around seeing the sights. Being honest Santiago gets pretty poor ...

... course, I realized that I had made a strategic error - upon arrival, we were given a choice of sitting near the reception, or around the corner near the window. Having chosen the window, we were out of view of the receptionist - d´oh! No matter, my strategy was now going to involve 4-5 trips to the bathroom, which happened to be immediately adjacent to the reception area :) Upon returning from the first foray to the bathroom, I had ...

... to another hostel which wasn't far away, but we wanted to save money by using public transport rather than getting ripped off in a taxi.<br><br>We tried to work out what their system was for buying tickets, and then tried out our remedial Spanish on the poor guy in the ticket ...

... could. Basically we just walked around. Looking at buildings and churches on the way.<br><br>We crossed the Mapocho River and took the funicular up to Cerro San Cristobal. We enjoyed an ice cream in the park. We didn't go to the Zoo though everybody else seemed to be. We did spend ages trying to take pictures of the snow covered Andes through the smog but they looked better through the human eye than the camera.<br ...