Martijn's Blog

First we checked out the centre of Santiago and found the city full of business men and women in suits. When we arrived the day before we'd already noticed that Chile seemed much more modern than Argentina. After sitting on a bench for about 45 minutes, watching the people go by, I remarked that I hadn't seen one attractive person at all. Sam had noticed the same.


old and modern in Santiago

We didn't really like Santiago so we went to the bus station and took a bus to the coastal city of Valparaiso. When we arrived there I wanted to see the ocean. When we walked over to the 'boulevard' we saw that Valparaiso is really a harbour town: we couldn't even get close to the water because of a high fence.

After having introduced Sam to raw herring for lunch at the german restaurant called Hamburg we decided that we also didn't want to stay here. So we took the shirt bus ride to neighbouring Viña del Mar.
Viña is much nicer than Valparaiso, it actually has a beach! There seemed to be many students too.

From this and my previous postings I guess it's pretty clear I am disappointed with Chile: the service is bad, people are much less friendly than in Argentina, it is much more expensive (they wanted us$65 for a lonely planet guide which had the original us$21 price on the back), we had trouble understanding the spanish and it is kind of boring after having been in Buenos Aires.

We both agreed that it we'd travelled enough and we wanted to go back to Buenos aires as soon as we could. We booked a plane ticket online for the next day with Air France(the round trip was cheaper then the one way)