Tag: Chile
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Chile: Epilogue
In no particular order, here are my thoughts on Chile, traveling, culture, people, and dogs. The day Becca and I left, my friend Michele (who lived in Santiago for about a decade) predicted that I would be surprised at how first-world Santiago is. And she was exactly right. Chile is a modern country with everything you’d expect from that and Santiago is absolutely a first-world, metropolitan city. Public transportation in the city (Metro) and between cities (bus companies like Tur Bus, who we used exclusively) was nothing less than surgical. Metro made San Francisco MUNI look bad and Tur Bus…
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Chile: Back to Santiago
Arriving back in Santiago felt like something of a homecoming; it was a really nice feeling to be traveling to a city that we were familiar with. Before leaving San Pedro, Becca and I had decided that we wanted to explore a new area, so we settled on Barrio Brasil, picked a hostel from the list in Lonely Planet, and got a taxi. Our driver didn’t speak much English, but insisted on trying to talk with us anyway. After a while, he steered the conversation to American music and then to Whitney Houston. We didn’t think anything of it until,…
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Chile: Atacama
Eleven hours on a bus is certainly not my idea of a good time, but the fact that our trip was mostly at night made the experience a lot more tolerable. As morning approached and we were within a couple hours of San Pedro, we hit (what we thought was) a traffic jam on Route 5. For a long time, we didn’t move an inch and eventually the driver turned the bus off entirely, which is never a good sign. When he started the bus again about half an hour later, he turned around and drove back towards Calama, the…
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Chile: Caldera
We arrived at the Caldera bus depot in the evening and grabbed a cab to our lodge (Ckamur Boutique Lodge), which we had booked that morning at a coffee shop in La Serena. After the cab left, we noticed that the lodge was in a somewhat isolated, very quiet part of town. In fact, the lodge itself was very quiet. Too quiet. Only the outside lights were on and it didn’t seem like anyone was around. We looked for a doorbell or speaker by the front door but couldn’t find either. We walked around the property looking for another way…
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Chile: La Serena
The next stop on our trip was La Serena, a smaller coastal resort town that is a popular tourist destination in the summer months (and the second-oldest city in Chile, after Santiago). The bus ride to La Serena along Route 5 (the asphalt artery that runs north-south through the country) was about six hours and was quite tolerable. Coaches in Chile are comfortable (with several seat upgrade options) and the bus companies are very timely and efficient. We arrived in the late afternoon, got lost walking from the bus depot, oriented ourselves using the sun, and eventually found our hostel…
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Chile: Valparaiso
We arrived in Valparaiso in the early afternoon and took a shuttle to our hostel (Hostal-Cafe Nomades), located on Cerro Alegre, one of the forty-two hills in the city. The term “hostel” is a bit misleading here, as this place felt a lot more like a B&B. Like the city itself, the entire hostel was colorful, cultural, and artistic; the walls were covered with murals and paintings done by the property owner, who is also a local artist. Our private space on the top floor had two rooms, two beds, a private bathroom, and a private balcony. Once we dropped…
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Chile: Santiago
The first twenty-four hours of the trip were about the same as any trip: lots of time spent miserably sitting uncomfortably or waiting in line. We connected through LAX and Panama City and then landed in Santiago on a cool Tuesday evening. After hitting up the currency exchange and securing our baller status with hundreds of thousands of colorful pesos (which I affectionately refered to as “Monopoly money”), we hopped in a cab for downtown. Becca was able to chat up the driver a bit with her Spanish, though we realized later that that poor driver now mistakenly thinks San…
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Chile: Prologue
During the end of May and beginning of June, I spent 18 days with a dear friend sauntering through the cities, beaches, mountains, and desert of Chile. The entire holiday was an incredible experience and now I’m faced with the daunting task of transcribing nearly three weeks of fun and adventures, large and small and everything in between. A lot happened during that time, so I’ll have to split up the entire tale into multiple blog entries (probably one for each week). Before I get ahead of myself, I should give a little context as to how this trip came…
