Day 43 - Santiago

Thursday, 25 September 2014

In the morning I went to the tour agency to sort out my tour to Easter Island. I thought it would be pretty straight forward but I ended up spending almost 3 hours there because the guy wrongly booked my flight ticket for me; as a result I had to go to the LAN office near the plaza de armas to change my flight. When I left the tour agency it was already past lunch time so I decided to walk to the local fish market to try some typical local dishes, as recommended by Felipe yesterday.

It was about a 20 minute walk. At the restaurant I ordered 2 typical local dishes, a seafood soup and a seafood chowder made of 7 different types of seafood and 2 different types of cheese. Both were simply delicious, and cheap too! I don't usually eat shelled seafood such as clams, muscles etc but this was too delicious to forgo. For some strange reason the waiter, a very pleasant, jolly round man, kept giving me free pisco sours but I said no more after the second pisco sour; I needed to walk to the LAN office and sort my ticket out!

After lunch I walked to the plaza de armas, and took many photos with my new camera, to my heart's content! I am a tourist for sure, can't live without my camera! After sorting out my flight ticket, I had just enough time for one hill, so I had to decide between Santa Lucia Hill or San Christobal Hill. I was a bit tired from all the waiting and walking, and since San Christobal Hill had a funicular and was higher than Santa Lucia Hill, I decided to go to San Christobal Hill. There I took the funicular up the hill. The view from the top of the hill was very beautiful, you could see the entire town of Santiago, with the sun setting in the background. There was also a beautiful statue of the Virgin Mary on top of the hill. 

I took the last funicular down at 6.45 pm, and then I walked to the nearest Metro and went to the bus station to buy my ticket to Argentina. Now that I know the rest of my schedule in Chile, I can start planning my trip to Argentina. After purchasing my bus ticket, I took the Metro back to Manuel Montt station, and thereafter back to the hostel. With all the walking I did today, I was more tired than I realised and fell almost immediately to sleep.