Robinson Crusoe Inn Santiago Las Condes

We did a walking tour around the city and took it easy with cafes, shopping and sightseeing. We sat in the park at the Plaza de Constitution overlooking the Palacio de la Moneda, the site of Pinochet´s 1973 coup. We also wandered around to look at the main square and the official building of congress, justice and the cathedral etc.<br><br>We head towards the airport for the night for an early flight into Calama, towards the north of Chile.

I have been in Santiago, Chile now for two days. It seems like it has been a week, and I still have mixed feelings about the city and what I am doing here.<br>Before leaving I had few expectations about coming here aside from eating some of the insane things I saw on the Travel Channel (of which I am an obnoxious fan). However, as soon as I got on the plane from Atlanta to Santiago I got a bit of a sense of what I was in for. Unlike regular national flights within the US, almost ...

... eerie, like something out of the opening scene of pirates of the carribean. Oh and there was a ´Charles Darwin Hotel´ which excited the geek in me very much! All the hostels in this town seemed to be rooms in family homes, which was a great cultural experience compared to the usual backpacker-type digs we have often been staying in. <br><br>The next day at 7am we headed to Puerto Montt, a city further north in Chile. We thought this would be ...

... about Mendoza and well pretty much every city I had the chance to visit in South America is the bountiful amount of stray dogs. I´m beginning to think they didn´t get the memo from Bob Barker about getting your pets spayed or neutered. I also began falling in love with the amazing different wines. Only about 30% of their wine is exported from their spectacular country, and the rest they keep for themselves. Hutto and I didn´t hesitate booking a ...

... a little pricier than others but very clean and had a great kitchen we used that night to cook pasta for dinner. Across the road was the bus station so we booked a bus for the next night to Mendoza Argentina where we decided to go for a few days before our flight to Brasil at the end of the week. Sunday 5th April. We spent the whole day doing nothing but lounging in the ...

... in dinner jackets etc, as you would see in Plaza San Marco in Venice for example. But here there's just a row of hot dog stands - all selling "complete" hot dogs i.e. with ketchup and mayo - usually less than £1 sterling including a soft drink. Some of the stands were called soda fountains. Then I went to the Mercado Central for lunch. This is the main fish market. As a market its not comparable to say La Boqueria in Barcelona, but its pleasant ...

... Chilean where they use hankerchiefs, Colin wanted to join in but only had paper tissues.....then did a Pub (well bar) crawl ending in an Irish Pub at 1.30am......no one eats until 10pm &amp; bars seem to get busier right through to 3am according to others in our group .We avoided night clubs as the word here means brothel !! The Santiago city tour was ok but focussed on either saints or dictators. Spent some time going up on the Funicular ...

... believe it or not) cities are not really my thing and i craved moving on... it is so easy to get exhausted so quick wandering around a city, you can get that back of the knee ache that you get as a child being dragged around a department store, within record speed, and there is something subliminal you have to stop every 15 minutes for refills.... So the trip accross the boarder was welcomed, apart from being held up for 2 hours by the tour de france chilian equivilant!!

Santiago hadn´t been on the ´must-see´list (just another big S.American City - right?), however with Salta out of the picture is was the next best destination for heading South. Our good friend, Manuel was kind enough to organise a stay at his family´s apartment and after a 20 hour journey arrived at their beautiful apartment in the suburbs where his ...

... of peace shows the fragility in that peace. While in Chile we heard news of a Peruvian minister being fired for saying Chileans should not be allowed into Peru (and that they smelled, or words to that effect). Chile and Argentina share a trait in female socialist Presidents, who we met! kind of, and appeared to have a bigger bond than most. Ecuador is currently more interested in making friends with Iran, which has to be an oil/anti-American ...