Preamble

[First of all I need to tell you how I feel. Which is dreadful, because my body is living by a different time zone which is 11 hours earlier than my current time zone. It's horrible, the first night i watched episodes of Rome then slept till one, then had to catch up on some more sleep around six pm. Bugger.]

Here was I in the plane to Santiago after waiting 8 hours for my connection from Buenos Aires. The only Spanish words that I knew and used proficiently were: agua, te and gracias (you can see how my attempt at learning Spanish turned out). I was of course wearing my mountain boots because my backpack weighed around 20 kg without them. I got to the hotel in time and met up with Mario and the gang. The gang, ah, the gang. Catalina, Mario's wife who had just successfully sprained her ankle for the third time that month, Lili, a journalist who was for the first time in an expedition, and Dan, whose previous experience was limited to climbing Elbrus (the tallest in Europe) oh some 15 years ago and who in the 7 years I've known him, never ceased to talk about it. We had to spend some days in Santiago to buy food and the necessary items like cutlery, knives, water and all that. Plus we had to rent a car.

Episode I - "Gringo vs Customs"

Mario had sent the tents and ice axes and some other items through cargo directly to Santiago. Which meant that we had to go pick'em up. This included a trip to the aduana (or customs), and a couple of trips around the customs office - first we understood the directions wrong (but my spanish was getting better) and arrived at the domestic customs, then we were missing a paper and had to return to the initial custom office, then the box in which the things were was different than the initial one they had sent the stuff in and we had to find an official to open the box up and verify its contents against the inventory, etc etc. Needless to say we were the only gringoes in that place.

Episode II - "Gringo Rents a Car"

We were so lucky with this one! There was one mention of a rent a car (though expensive) in lonely planet, but it was on a street that had a lot of rent-a-cars, and luckily we were able to find one that had what we wanted at a reasonable price. We needed a 4x4 truck with double cabin and found a red Nissan that fitted the purpose marvelously. So if you ever need to rent a car in Santiago, go to Alamo rent a car, it's on Francisco Bilbao.

Epidsode III - "Gringo in Town"

If it wasn't enough that Santiago is full of pick-pocketers, Mario was filming and Dan was carrying around the Nikon D200. We got warnings from fellow gringoes, from old ladies in the fruit market (I ate cherries!!! A lot of them!!! And they had so many fruits!!), and even from the Chilean Carabineros.
The Central Market in Santiago (Mercado Central) is not so much a place to buy things from but is filled with seafood restaurants and seafood sellers. We went to try a famous oyster soup, called Marisco, and at one of the restaurants we were greeted by Luis, who had been to university in Romania and spoke romanian!

My spanish got better after this, and I was quite able to order in a restaurant, take the clothes to the washer and ask for directions. Goood, good!





Santiago is a nice town but not extraordinary. It did not strike me as having anything special, just a lot of people on the streets, chilling out and talking (when do these people work?!). People relax, talk, walk around, get their shoes polished (the shoe polisher is an institution both in Chile and Argentina). There are coffee shops in which customers (males in general) stand at a bar and drink coffee and enjoy chatting with female servers dressed in dresses that do not leave much to the imagination (I kid you not).

However the food these people eat is amazing. They have an immense variety of meat dishes. My favorites were parillada, which is a meat grill that is absolutely huge, and lomo alo pobre, which is lomo, a 2 -4 cm width steak, with fries, two eggs and onions [pictures coming soon]. You can order it with Cristal, which is the national beer, and Cristal can come in a vase (around 1.5 l, 2l) which is called Pitcher. Yum!

After we got everything settled we were ready to go. We hit the road one fine morning, around 1 pm :)). Soon after you exit Santiago you enter the Atacama desert. The road follows the coast of the Pacific ocean and as such you have the Pacific on your left and the Atacama full of cacti and boulders on your right. From time to time you might see some trees around a pond and a hacienda behind them.

We even watched a horse race. I think this scenery goes like this until the town of La Serena, where we stopped for the night in an amazing hostel called "El Hibiscus". Here we were served fresh milk and homemade jam for breakfast by Mauricio and his wife, who run the hostel.

Next, how we left La Serena and what happened then.