Phil's Blog

It was hard to find out information about Chile. Unlike Argentina there were absolutely no books or guides by Fodors or Lonely Planet. So we were kind of flying in the dark and didn't know quite what to expect. Once again we got an apartment in the center of Santiago, and it had this gorgious view from the deck.

The topography is shaped by the nearby Andes, so there were interesting hills and things. We climbed one on our second day.



Tempting fate already by buying frozen fruit juice thing from a random street vendor.



This hill went up and up, giving views here of "Sanhattan", and the tallest building in South America.



You climb up this old fort with narrow slipper stairs, which was a little scary at points, but got this awesome panorama of the city at the top.



Hard to show how narrow and odd the stairs were.



At the base on one side of the hill they had a cool Neptune's Plaza area.



I thought Chile would be more third world feeling than Buenos Aires, but it was actually the opposite. Everything is much cleaner and orderly. One thing that is the exception though are the street dogs. They have 2.5 million stray dogs wandering around (more about this later), and on the second night Kelly made kissy noises at one and he followed us. At the time we didn't know the scale of the stray dogs thing and thought this might be someone's pet we stole. He wouldn't stay or go away and followed us all the way back to our apartment. We named him "Estacionamiento".



We of course left him outside, but to our surprise... in the morning he was waiting for us. Had we just accidentily adopted a pet? Oh little Estacionamiento.



We also checked out the nearby city cemetary. It didn't have (as many) impressive tombs as Buenos Aires, but they did have a tradition I really like, which is planting a garden on the graves.



On Tuesday we took a bus to Valpraiso...

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