Extreme adventures in Chile!

7th - 12th August 2012

We left Sydney at 9.30am on Tuesday 7th August and after a 16 hour flight, we arrived in Santiago, Chile on Tuesday 7th August at 11.30am! The flight was fine apart from no sleep again so we were wrecked arriving in Chile. In particular, I think the strange change in time zone really affected us as we ended up going backwards and gained a day!

Our hostel had our room ready when we arrived so we decided to get some sleep first of all. When we were shown to our room we were each handed a pair of earplugs which we figured didn't bode well for our stay!! Our room was right beside the kitchen so it was noisy during the afternoon but it turned out we were nearly always the last ones to bed so it was quiet enough at night! We set our alarms to wake up at 5pm but ended up sleeping through them and not waking until 7pm. Such a waste of the whole day! As we were so tired and didn't want to hunt out a decent restaurant we took the lazy way out and went out to a lonely planet recommended restaurant and it was only after we went in and sat down that we realised the whole menu was in Spanish! This would be tough enough on a normal day but coupled with jet-lag, made it impossible! Ronan decided to go for spaghetti bolgenese as it was easiest whereas I went for a dish with two words I thought I recognised - pollo (chicken) and broqueta (thought it was related to bruschetta) but turned out to be a chicken skewer thing which was yummy but Ronan didn't fare so well! After the fantastic food experiences we had in Asia it looked as if South America wasn't going to come close.

We went back to the hostel after dinner and I had a couple of drinks while we got chatting to a few others who were staying there. We were all interested in doing snowboarding so we decided to make a hostel day out of it with our new friends of two hours Sophie, Matt and Sol on Thursday. This seemed to be just the way South America is!

Wednesday morning we got up just in time for breakfast.  Breakfast in South America is a much more sociable affair than it is in Asia where we sat chatting to everyone else in the hostel for at least an hour before eventually heading out sightseeing. We mostly just walked around the city before getting the funicular up to a catholic shrine at the top of San Cristobal hill. After visiting so many sites of different religions over the past few months it was nice to be around our own religion for a change! It was really peaceful on top of the hill and had an amazing city view and view of the Andes

The steep funicular up to the top of the San Cristobal hill

The shrine at the top

Us chilling at the top appreciating the view

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On the way down we saw a dog using the funicular to get up and down the hill aswell, it´s amazing how it learned to do it!  After grabbing some lunch we spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the city and various markets. We spent most of the evening packing for snowboarding, getting stuff for lunch and having a few drinks with the others in the hostel. We had an early-ish night considering we were getting up at 6.30am tomorrow.

Even though breakfast isn't usually served until 8am, the hostel owner said he would do it for us early as we were leaving for snowboarding at 7am. It was just that sort of a place where they did anything they could to help! Although some of us who ate the eggs were feeling a little dodge so not sure if he actually did us a favour!

So the five of us from the hostel headed off at 7am and eventually arrived at the place where we were getting our equipment - snow jacket, trousers, gloves, snow boots and the snowboards. It took a while to be measured and get sorted but we were finally ready to hit the slopes at La Parve (beginners slope) at 11am. We had a group lesson for 10 people for two hours. To be honest I was actually rubbish and the instructor got a impatient with me! Apparently 'white girls are always so much trouble' according to the instructor. Nice! Towards the end of the lesson Ronan and Matt started showing me how to do it and I started to get it so just wish I had more time and less people in the group. Ronan was really good and got it super quickly. He was flying it until he fell and hurt his ass and decided he had enough! He gave it a really hard bang and it was so sore. We had all fallen on our asses so many times but think this was a particularly bad one!

Looks like a pro doesn´t he!

This is how I spent most of the time - on  my arse!

The hostel gang!

It was funny cos we had worn layers and then rented snow jackets thinking it was going to be absolutely freezing but once we started doing the snowboarding we were roasting!  Both of us want to do it again anyways but we were pretty happy that our first experience of it was in the Andes! We spent the rest of the afternoon after our lesson finished around these slopes and visiting another slope, Valle Nevada, which is a full proper ski slope for non-beginners. By the time we went to Valle Nevada we had given back our rented ski clothes and were absolutely frozen! It was proper cold as it was further up the mountain.
We eventually got back to the hostel around 7pm totally wrecked! The other guys were talking about going out but myself and Ronan were wrecked so he decided he wanted to cook dinner so we had a very civilised hostel dinner with vodka penne, bread and wine!! Totally yum! Everyone was too wrecked to go out so it was another few drinks in the hostel that evening!

Dinner cooked by Ronan

The next day was Friday which was our last day in Santiago so we did something I really wanted to do - a tour of the Concha y Toro vineyard which boasts the Casillero del Diablo brand as its most famous product. After another long leisurely breakfast we took public transport out to the vineyard and arrived a few minutes late for the tour so had to wait around until 2.30pm. At first we thought this would be annoying until we discovered the really nice restaurant where I was able to get a cheese plate and glass of wine while sitting out in the courtyard in the sun, sheer bliss! Totally different to yesterday spent in the snow in the mountains!

Vineyard Concho y Toro

Enjoying cheese, wine and sunshine!

On Saturday morning we were flying to San Pedro de Atacama. The buses were all booked out for the days we wanted and it turned out it was only €20 more expensive to fly and avoid a 24 hour bus journey! We actually had to fly to Calama which is an hour from San Pedro. When we arrived to Calama the tight backpacker-ness came out in us again when a dude tried to charge us $10,000 pesos (€16.60) but we had read it should only be $2,500 so we refused to get on the bus. All of a sudden the whole carpark of the airport emptied and we were left standing there with no one around and no idea what to do! We decided to get a taxi into the town and then try to get a bus from there. When we got to the bus terminal we realised that we had missed the bus and had to wait 2 hours for another! We were sitting in the waiting room with another woman  who had piles of bags beside her.  Her boyfriend came back and they gathered up all their stuff and headed down the street. Ronan decided to follow them in case they found another bus which was going earlier. So he stalked them down the street until they eventually turned around and asked him whether he was looking for a bus to San Pedro, he said he was so they brought him to the bus station to buy tickets for a bus that was leaving in 15 minutes! We got some of the last seats on the bus so it was good going and saved us so much time. The fact that we wasted so much of this extra walking about San Pedro trying to find our hostel is neither here nor there! When we finally found our hostel we discovered a male Chilean Alainn lived there! He was so cute and had the same mannerisms as Alainn so I felt like I was cheating on her hanging out with this other cocker spaniel!

The Atacama desert is the driest place on earth - some weather stations there have never recorded rain! San Pedro is at an altitude of 2,400m which means it has 30% less oxygen than we normally would have at sea level. We had to be careful to eat little and often, drink loads, avoid alcohol and walk slowly.

On the Saturday afternoon after we checked into our hostel, we got into the town and just went for a walk around. It's a really pretty town and looks really old fashioned as the whole town is UNESCO protected.

Just a normal day with a llama in the local shop

Pretty little heritage town

That evening we had booked a star gazing tour in the desert. This started at 9pm and while waiting for the bus we met Willy and Sarah, a couple from Killenny who were on the same trip. Turns out they were doing more or less the same trail as us for the next few weeks so we meet them on and off again loads of times over the next couple of weeks! As most of you know neither myself nor Ronan would be particularly big into astronomy but this tour was really good and I've honestly never seen as many stars in my life. It was crazy cold despite all the layers I was wearing so they gave us blankets to wrap around us! We saw things like the Southern Cross that we had never seen before as the sky looks different from the Northern Hemisphere. There were 10 telescopes pointed at different things like Saturn, different constellations etc. At the end we got cups of hot chocolate to warm us up before being dropped back into town around midnight. It was really good but we were so wrecked and only fit for bed afterwards!

The get-up of me in my warm Inca clothes!!

Sunday morning we decided to have a sleep in before heading into town to buy supplies for the three day tour we were starting the following day. We had to buy fruit, snacks like cereal bars, cream crackers, peanut butter etc. We also had to buy warm clothes like jumpers, gloves, woolly socks, scarves and warmer pants. We were warned that the salt flats tour was freezing so to wrap up! So we spent the morning shopping for supplies (spending all the cash we had!) before going on a 3pm desert tour to see the Valley of the Luna. This was basically going out to the Atacama desert to see various stone and sand formations carved by the wind and finally to a high viewing point to watch the sunset.

Valley of the Luna

Ronan´s arty shot!

Afterwards we went back into San Pedro and tried to go to the ATM. There were only two in the town and both were out of order! Due to our shopping spree earlier on we were completely out of cash! And we hadn't even had dinner yet! We tried to change some euros we had left but of course the only money exchange in town was trying to screw us with the rate! We ended up finding a restaurant that took credit card for dinner or else it would have been peanut butter sandwiches back at the hostel! It was annoying as we needed cash to bring on the tour. Anyways there was nothing we could do about the cash situation this evening so we headed back to the hostel after dinner and a few drinks to pack and get ready to leave.