Breakfast was as expected, and last night's bottle of delicious Misiones de Rengo reserva made sure we had a restless night. Does it really matter when you look out the window at the church opposite your hotel and notice that a massive pigeon must have flown into the cross on the top?
Of course, then you can enjoy the sight of traffic backed up on the road too.
That's enough hanging around in Chillán, we've exhausted it. Let's go to Santiago and enjoy big city prices for things. The bus journey was 5 hours long and the bus was a little later. All a lot more comfortable than the last time we were on a bus, surely, except that this time our allocated seats are occupied by some woman and her child, and we get relegated to the back of the bus, behind a couple who sit fully reclined the whole five hours. No chance of getting any music done on this bus. No chance of stretching our legs or eating the dregs of last night's pizza either.
At least the countryside is pretty. This is clearly Chile's 'breadbox'; nowhere in my life have I seen so many fields farmed, one after the other, for such long stretches of road. It makes a nice change from bleak dust.
At this motorway junction we spotted a few acres of wine grapes. Lovely!
It's quite strange to get closer to the capital and never escape the mountains encroaching on you from either side. Very curious to see how that looks from the peak of Santa Lucía hill in Santiago, the highest point in the city.
As you can see, it wasn't all lovely fields of fruit being grown for our edification. Some of the landscape was horrid and stripped bare.
Arriving in Santiago was like being jolted from a sleep. The bus station was a little 'low-key', as long as 'low-key' means 'like a dump'. It felt like we had been rolling through the countryside merely moments before. I have to ask one of our fellow passengers if this is Terminal De Sur. It is. We disembark and collect our bags. This doesn't feel like the main bus terminal in the sole First World country in Latin America.
Through the bus ticket kiosks we go, through the endless maze of crappy shops, and find ourselves on Alameda, or Avenida O'Higgins as the street signs inform us. Half a block up there's a metro stop. So far its all on a much smaller scale than we had anticipated. Our first capital city on the Pacific side of the Andes doesn't feature the broad sweeping thoroughfares and towering blocks of architectural grandeur we had gotten used to on the Atlantic side. Instead we've got some relatively low-rise buildings, plenty of folk selling pruck from benches on the side of the footpath, and some rather intense late afternoon sun (which isn't that unusual, truth be told). We jump off the Metro at Republica (the Metro works on a system of peak-time / high-peak / off-peak tariffs. At peak-time its $620 (60p ish) to get from any Metro stop to any other stop in the city. I wish I could explain to people about the Tube and Oyster Cards, but it would be too ridiculous.
Our hostel is just off Avenida Brazil, but we found this attractively-named street just before we got there!
Hostel Landay is a decent spot, another big house with a wee cafe in the front, decent bathrooms, hot water, sadly no access to the kitchen in the evenings but there's always an electric stove if you need it. And there's a kettle. We'll get plenty of use out of that in the coming days.
We get showered and head out to orientate ourselves in Barrio Brazil. What can we find in the streets around us, apart from an endless number of shops selling car parts?
We found a house with a couple of mannequins outside it, just like in Carrick!
Ok, our motivation was really to find some food. Up the road we find a big bar called Springfield, Simpsons-themed, and a bunch of folk watching the Cruzeiro - Universidad De Chile Copa Libertadores game. Seems like a good place to stop. I have a shameful pint of Stella. Sarah attempts to disown me. Cruzeiro destroy UDC 5-1. This massive plate of food is called a pichanga, which means 'mountain of chips with meat on top'. We have seen people devastate these single-handedly down here (which may explain the size of a few guys and gals down here). This one was polished off by both of us.
Back on the streets before sunset, we take in our daily churches.
This one was beautiful but very closed down and decrepit.
So that's the initial look of Santiago. Tomorrow will be a day to tackle the city centre and, importantly, for me to buy a new camera.
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