Entries about santiago

Returning back to Santiago we were excited to be able to meet up with Dries, who was on our 21 day tour through Peru. I convinced the boys that we should take the bus for 1.5 hours over to the town of Valparaiso for the day, which from the photos and what I had read, it was a beautiful and colourful UNESCO seaside town.

Well the morning didn’t quite go as planned, the taxi driver dropped us at the wrong station and then when we finally got to the right station, the bus ended up leaving 10 minutes late, which meant we arrived in Valpo 40 minutes after the walking tour we wanted to do started. We thought our luck had changed when the tourist information kiosk said they had a city tour that covered all of Valparaiso and also visited Vina del Mar, so we booked our tickets and waited for the bus…which didn’t come…so the guide sent us to get a coffee…30 minutes later we returned and still no bus. So an hour into our day at Valpo and we hadn’t seen much more than the bus depot, BUT finally the bus arrived and took us to the harbour where we would meet our guide. The harbour smelt terrible and wasn’t something we would consider worth looking at, yet our guide said we had 20 minutes to ‘explore’. We ended up being there for nearly 45 minutes while one family spent forever walking around. Eventually we were on the tour bus and ready to see Valpo…well we were the only English speaking people on the bus and every time the guide gave the explanation in English everyone else on the bus started talking, so we didn’t really get much of an explanation at what we were looking at.

In short there isn’t much to write about, we went and saw the colourful street art and drove around the town. We stopped for lunch with a view of the shipping harbour and the food was terrible. We took what felt like the worlds oldest cable car down the side of a mountain and questioned if it would really pass a health and safety check! Then was back on the bus to see Vina del Mar which had a clock made of flowers and an average looking beach - we were pretty disappointed.

We headed back to Santiago around 4pm and wished we had spent the day doing something else, but it was at least nice to catch up with Dries for the day.

Now its time to board our final night bus and head into Argentina and to celebrate my birthday in Mendoza.