Another post I've moved from my original Bootsnall blog. Because I've already posted a couple today and this is such a short post with no pictures and of very little interest to anyone but me I will decline payout (not that there would have been much anyway :-). I just want to get my blog posts on the block chain so they can never be lost.
Santiago
The bus journey from Valparaiso to Santiago only took an hour which was cool and we spent an hour trying to call hostels with no success (I think there was supposed to be some sort of code before the number or something). Eventually this American guy recommended a place called “Hostel De Sammy” that was not in the guide book. I was happy that it was not in the book because I had become used to everything in the book concerning hostels being wrong.
The hostel turned out to be really good. It had free internet with free printing facilities as well as a chipped XBox and Playstation 2 that could be used anytime as well as table tennis and pool and a choice of hundreds of movies that could be watched in surround sound. Everything was free apart from the room but maybe I was setting my “free goalposts” too far apart with that one !!
Anyway, we met quite a few cool people while we were there and spent most of our time chilling out and drinking outside with everyone. There was even a guy who played guitar so we had a bit of a singalong. One our last night we went to a reggae bar which was a bit of a mistake because we had to be up at the crack of dawn the next morning to get a bus. We eventually got to bed at about 4am and felt a bit under the weather on the journey back into Argentina on the bus.
Santiago is a beautifully located city and, “The majestic Andean Mountain Range can be seen from almost anywhere in the city”. I had to take my guidebooks word for the last sentence because unfortunately for us Santiago has a bit of a problem with smog in winter so we were not able to see any sign of the Andes. I have managed to steal a photo from another web site that shows you what I could have seen.
I have not painted a very good picture of Santiago and it is probably much better in the summer but to be honest I was glad to leave the place.