Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Santiago

After a long trip on which I didn't manage to sleep much and left me with sore knees I got to Santiago airport at one in the afternoon (having left 16 hours earlier at 11am). I'm not sure my 1 hour at Christchurch airport counts as a new country so I haven't given it a post of its own. Once I got to the hostel I proceeded to settle down to try and sleep for a short while, but in the end had five hours of weird and crappy sleep. I nipped out for dinner and found that Chile was definitely going to be more expensive than I thought. That night I slept poorly, with some jetlag insomnia, and also getting fairly pissed off with noisiness of the hostel, which turned out to be a bit of a party hostel, with my dorm right by the reception where you could here the doorbell going every 5 minutes all night. Also, when I came back from dinner there was a guy pissing in the doorway. And not just quietly doing it in the corner, but waving his willy about like a sprinkler. Having waited till he went to tiptoe through the doorway, I wasn't feeling to enamoured with Chile at this point.

Next day was Santiago day, I headed into town pretty early, found that to the rate of commission on travellers cheques is prohibitively extensive so used my card instead, and then wandered around the Plaza de Armas for a bit before the museums opened. First up was the museum of Pre-Columbian Civilization. This had a excellent and fairly compact collection with informative English captions. Quite freaky were the Chinchorro Mummies, made millenea before the Egyptians were making theirs, where internal organs and bones were replaced with mud rocks and sticks. After that I took in the National History museum. This had eclectic collections from a long period, but all the captions were Spanish, so I couldn't get much out of them. I walked around a bit before grabbing lunch and heading up a large hill overlooking the town on a funicular railway. From the top I could finally see the snow-capped mountains overlooking Santiago peeping over the smog. At the top was a statue of the Virgin Mary, and half way up was a zoo, which you could smell before you could see. After that I went to visit one of Neruda's houses, getting the English language tour all to myself. I enjoyed this, it was built in three separate parts to look like a ship and have great views, and is full of interesting knick-knacks and pieces of art from around the world. Something a bit different.

When I was here I realised I'd lost my key to the padlock I'd put on a locker with my bag in it back at the hostel. D'oh. It had been in my wallet so I retraced my steps to everywhere I'd had it out. At the bank they seemed to say they had it, but couldn't give me it until the next day (as they spoke as much english as I do Spanish, this involved having to make the internationally recognised gesture for "I've lost the small key to my padlock in your bank, maybe"). The next day after going to Valpairiso I went back and indeed they had it so I didn't need to smash the locker open. Still have no idea why they couldn't give it to me straight away.

Anyway, that afternoon I also had time to visit the Palace de belle artes, which was a good collection of generally fairly modern art in a beautiful old building. That night I struggled through a beer in the hostel ("just one" I thought but they're 1 litre big here) before going to bed and grumping again, it wasn't the right hostel to chose to try to sleep through my jet lag. I'd decided to go on a trip through the lakes leaving on after my third night there, which meant a dash to take in Valpairiso in a day trip the next day. At 630 am I knew I'd get no more sleep that night so I got up and headed straight to Valpairiso, see the next post for details of that.
I got back at about 3 in the afternoon to Santiago so I had time to get a haircut and search out another museum before going to the bank to retrieve my key! Well I was trying to go to the museum of solidarity for Savadore Allende, but it was shut for restoration. The guy there directed me to somewhere on the other side of town where I thought it was temporarily housed, but this turned out to be a different Allende museum, with a small collection of works by modern Chilean artists. Was ok, but had an interesting photography exhibition. After that I walked to town to het my key (I must have walked 10 miles this day) passing though town it was packed with people and they were pumping out a pan-pipe version of night fever through a tannoy all down the street. Strange. That night I watched a slide show in the hostel about the trip I was doing the next day, and a similar trip to the north, where I hope to head later. Next morning I got up for the minibus south, eventually getting my breakfast in time after it taking them over an hour to fail to make toast.

I actually liked Santiago as a city once I got out to see it. Was in a bit of a grump for a bit with jetlag and lack of sleep, and the key incident to worry about, so wasn't very social in the hostel.

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