I arrived in Santiago on Friday 21st December after taking a flight from Punta Arenas and checked into a very swish boutique hostel in the cool area of Bellavista. Biggest bunk beds ever, crisp linen, private bathrooms for the dorms, very modern kitchen and lounge area with flat screen. Complete with a roof top terrace which overlooked the San Cristobel hill, Patio Bellavista and the snow capped Andes in the distance. It was such a contrast to the remote mountains I’d been in less then thirty hours before! I had three nights at this hostel before I joined a tour which started on Christmas Eve, that first night I went for a few drinks locally with a group from the hostel trying out the local Pisco sours and woke with a mild hangover on Saturday morning. Spent the weekend not doing an awful lot, the city is the most westernised place I’ve been in four months. It’s very safe, well ordered and clean, whilst maybe not the most exciting place I’ve been, for a few days it was very relaxing for me. The metro system is excellent, cheap, quick, and so easy to use. I headed out to the Costanera centre shopping centre, biggest shopping mall in South America. The German girl I’d met in Pucòn had advised me on a place to get a pedicure there, which after all the hiking I really “needed”. Complete with hot wax footbath, pretty impressive place! The shopping mall was a little overwhelming, particularly being the day before Christmas Eve it was heaving! On seven floors, complete with a huge snow dome with Santa and fake snow, and minstrels wandering the floors playing Christmas music….all quite surreal and I still wasn’t feeling the festive vibe!

There were a lot of Brazilians in my hostel and it was pretty fun trying to communicate in a mix of my poor Spanish, English and Portuguese. Some words are exactly the same, but the accent is so different! A Chilean local fast food is the Completo, which is essentially a hot dog. But with a multitude of toppings, most popular being avocado. It’s a very cheap meal and really tasty, but I could easily get into a one a day habit if not careful! Another Chilean food specially best shared and eaten after a hangover is Chorillana a plate of chips, with shredded beef, chicken, onions and topped with fried eggs! On the healthier side is the Ceviche, raw fish cooked/seared
in lemon juice with onion, coriander and peppers. It’s the best!

On Christmas Eve, I spent the morning doing a little bit of sight seeing, I would have done more but Monday all museums are shut! I took the free bus up the San Cristobel hill for some panoramic views of the city. At the top is a statue of Mary with a small church. I then wandered down the hill, which I don’t think should have taken too long but somehow got a bit lost on a very disused track, and didn’t see anyone for half an hour. Hiking down a hill in flip flops, with no water on a hot day not my best idea, I came across a couple of the park workmen who put me back on the right track. I then walked round a couple of the other neighbourhoods, finishing at the Mercado central fish market and was accosted by every restaurant for my business, I had a decent ceviche and then headed back through the throngs of last minute shoppers to my hostel. The traffic was all of a sudden pretty mental in town as people were leaving work early to get home for Christmas Eve which is the main celebration here. I had planned to grab a taxi to transfer to the hotel which was my tour starting point but realised the Metro would be much quicker and cheaper!

I think normally going from a hostel to a hotel your going to expect an upgrade, but having left the H Rado super modern new hostel for my very dated small pokey hotel it did not feel like this, but it was totally fine. I’d booked this tour before I left the UK, partly to ensure I was with a group for Christmas and New Year, and the tour itinerary was great. But having travelled on my own now for two months, I had slightly started to regret the tour as I felt more then capable of doing all of this solo. I’d also found out only five of us were on the tour and was thinking it might all be a bit of a disaster. When I checked in there was a sign for our group to meet at seven and bring something for dinner to share. As after six pm literally everything in the city shut we would not have been able to eat anywhere out our tour guide had persuaded the hotel to cook dinner for us all. So we all met at seven with a bottle of something and went through the tour info and got to know each other a bit. It’s a great mix with no one from the same country, four girls and one young chap from Melbourne. I am the oldest but don’t feel it, and our guide Nancy from Peru is great. She had bought us all Santa Hats which she’d decorated in glitter with the companies “G”logo, which helped the festive spirits. Dinner was average, but I appreciated the sentiment of plain turkey with potato croquette balls! We finished off two bottles of Cava, couple of reds and a bottle of Pisco, waited till midnight to wish each other a happy Christmas and hit the sack.

So Christmas Day on the itinerary of our tour was a free day with a few options like a wine tour, but everything was shut so we took a bus to the coast to Valparaiso and and Vina del Mar. As had the Ozzie guy I’d been to Valparaiso before, and both done the walking tour, so between us we did half of the tour and told the group what info we could remember. It was so quiet wondering around the streets, Christmas Day is a very quiet day with most people staying in bed till gone midday following Xmas eve festivities. It’s a great town, and I was very happy to return. We then took a twenty minute bus up the coast to the beach resort town of Vina del Mar which is such a contrast to the steep hills covered in colourful houses of Valparaiso. But it had a beach! So Christmas Day lunch was fried hake with Chilean tomato salad sunbathing on the beach followed by churros, I can’t complain. A few of us braved the Pacific Ocean for about ninety seconds, it was freezing and very rough but worth it! We took an early evening bus back to Santiago, and in the evening restaurants had started to open again so we went for a nice dinner and I had great a great ceviche, everyone was shattered and we were leaving in the morning early so not a late night.

So I’m now on a bus heading six hours up the coast to La Serena, and will be with the tour till 11th January ending in La Paz. It’s quite nice not having to plan and book everything for the next two weeks, and some of the places I’m going to and some of the things I’m hopefully going to do are going to be amazing!!!