Santiago - mainland South America
Trip Start
Dec 22, 2007
1
9
48
Trip End
May 01, 2008
Santiago,
Chile
Thursday, January 3, 2008
1 Jan - 4 Jan 2008
We have finally arrived on mainland South America. We had a good flight across to Santiago and managed to get the bus to the city and find the hostel quite easily.
It´s been pretty hot here (about 28C) so we have been hiding in internet cafes to catch up with the blog.
The city centre is full of very large old colonial buildings with wide streets. It reminds me a bit of New York. The traffic is similar too, they have more cabs than NY and around 8000 busses. We´ve been to a couple of museums, the best one was the pre-columbino museo which had Chinchurro mummies from Arica (where we will be going through at some point). The museum also had a special exhibition entitled Sex and Power. This was about a tribe called Moche who performed slightly disturbing ritual sex acts as part of their beliefs (and then made pottery depicting them...)
Yesterday we went to the fish market and had lunch there. Lucy had grilled swordfish and I had sea bass.
We´ve been struggling a bit with the language barrier here. Very few people speak English and they speak Spanish far faster than our brains can cope with at the moment. They also drop letters (mainly s) which makes it tricky to understand the words we do know.
Tomorrow we head south to Punta Arenas. Hopefully we will be able to go to the penguin colony but the weather forecast is not too promising at the moment. We´re hoping it is like all New Zealand forecasts - wrong.
