Well alter the debacle of the airline as mentioned in the previous entry, I made it to Santiago in Chile. I had a couple of hours to wait for Rob as she CAME in from Sydney. It is a 16 hour flight from Sydney via NZ, so its a long haul.
Santiago is an interesting city. It is nestled in a natural basin in the Andes mountain range. This gives it one of the most stunning panoramas of any city in the World. However it also jeans a big problem. Pollution. In Fac. for a small city (about 3 million) is is terrible polluted. It is the 8th most polluted city in the World which seems to stand in Stara contrast to the beautiful snow capped mountains all around.
The problem is that the pollution cant get out as it is trapped in the valley. There have been all shorts of ideas as bandied about to solve the problem, including believe it or not, blowing a hole in the mountains to let the pollution out. The thought of cleaner living has not seemed to enter the thought process.
Santiago is an interesting city. It is nestled in a natural basin in the Andes mountain range. This gives it one of the most stunning panoramas of any city in the World. However it also jeans a big problem. Pollution. In Fac. for a small city (about 3 million) is is terrible polluted. It is the 8th most polluted city in the World which seems to stand in Stara contrast to the beautiful snow capped mountains all around.
The problem is that the pollution cant get out as it is trapped in the valley. There have been all shorts of ideas as bandied about to solve the problem, including believe it or not, blowing a hole in the mountains to let the pollution out. The thought of cleaner living has not seemed to enter the thought process.
Santiago is about the same lattitude as Sydney so it is experiencing similar weather (well, without the bucketing rain and storms), it was about 30 degrees during the day which is too hot for a fat bugger like me to be walking around in and a bit of a shock after pleasant high ttens in mexico. Rob of course, being the sunlover she is, was in her element.
We stayed in a small hotel called Hotel Vegas. In the Centro Historico part of town. It was a great little hotel, rooms were pretty Basic but nice enough for our needs. We were both pretty weary after all the travelling so we just lazed about for the first night. We did manage to pop next door for a beer first which may not have been the best idea.
The reason I say this is that we met a french man who was staying around the corner and he had been robbed…… twice….. just outside our hotel. Took his laptop and Iphone and cash and cards. He was wusing his laptop and phone in a back lane in Santiago….. really, that is just stupid. Anyway, on hearing this Rob went into a bit of shock and was very jumpy the rest of the whole time.
Anyway, we cruised around a few of the old sites in the city centre the next day and met up with the guys again for a beer that night. Santiago is a nice enough city in my opinión but there is nothing to make it noteworthy, except from the mountains that you cant see because of the smog. The people were nice enough to us, but you never quite felt safe walking around. I felt less confortable here than in Mexico City and that is saying something!
We jumped on the plane and have headed down to Stara one of the key parts of the trip, Patagonia! I just hope we can manager toi fluye a few of the tours in last minute style as we are very late in deciding what we want to do. Stay tuned for the next post.
Check out the flickr link to the right as there are heaps of pics of Santiago up there.
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