In the Beginning…

Nov 14th-17th. Santiago and Around

I’ve come to the conclusion that probably the easiest thing to do for the journal entry is split them up by where we were, so not all the information is thrown you at once so that you have to suffer though a 10-page entry and you don’t have to have everything scattered in about 20-30 entries.
So in the beginning of my trip, Tom and I attempted to sleep on the floor at JFK outside the check baggage area (by the way, JFK does not have seating before the baggage check area, so if you arrive at midnight for a flight at five in the morning (check in at 3 am) as we did, you should probably bring a mattress with you, unless you can fall asleep standing up). At three in the morning we checked in for our flights and went through baggage check to find all the benches on the other side were already taken, so we found another “cozy” corner on the marble floor to catch an hour or 2 sleep.
Lets us breeze through the next 12 hours, for they were rather uneventful. We arrived in Santiago, Chile at about eight at night their time (6 o’clock our time). When we got to the subway system, we met two really friend men from the US who helped us find the subway stop we needed and gave us some tips on some adventures we should do, ie canyoning.
We were able to find our hostel easily enough. We dropped our stuff off, signed in and then went out to dinner to relax after the long day of travel. We ended up choosing a nice looking Italian restaurant where they didn’t speak a word of English and so our struggles with language that would follow and hinder us throughout our trip, began with the ordering of our meal and drinks.
Sunday the 15tth, we explored downtown Santiago. We walk around to a couple of museums that we walked through quickly since all the signs were in Spanish. We went through a metropolitan park, a cashier man in a convenience store spent about 10 minutes with us kindly trying to explain how to say the different types of Chilean change, and to the top of a small mountain with the Virgin Mary at top. There I discovered that Chileans do not have a taste for very spicy things but very sweet things. I bought a drink that I thought would be an ice-tea but it was actually a way too sweet syrupy drink. It was interesting though-it had this fluffy rice like substance on the bottom and whole apricots floating in it, looking like little brains.
After this little adventure we made our way to the bus station to buy tickets for Pucon for Tuesday night and then headed out to dinner at a place one of our hostel hosts recommended to us. Tom got a salmon dish, and the salmon was absolutely fantastic. Our meal was only eventful because of a crazy man walking by while meowing at us, and a young boy playing on a walking multi-drum set (I was pretty impressed, I would have gotten dizzy spinning around that fast and playing some good rhythms at the same time).
Monday started off on the completely wrong foot. The plan as to go to Cajon del Maipo, catch the bus there at 7:30 in the morning, hike there for a short while, maybe do some rafting or paragliding. Then in the evening catch the bus to El Morado, the National Monument, which is suppose to be an incredibly beautiful park. Then Tuesday head back around 6 to catch our bus at 11:00
That was the plan, this was the reality: Tom and I slept though all our alarms got up about 8:30, threw things together quickly, checked out of our rooms and put luggage in storage. With the metro, we went to one stop to find out is was the wrong one and had to take the metro again back in the direction we came and past it to get to the opposite side of Santiago. When we finally got to the right stop, we had to find where the bus station was exactly, food shop, communicate what we wanted and then we finally jumped on the bus to Cajon del Maipo at about 11:30. We went to San Gabriel first, the furthest town on that bus route and the closest to the park. We got to San Gabriel which according to the maps had hiking and camping. We get there, to find a very small town, with a cop station a few houses and this little food stand. We “talked” with the two kids at the food stand who couldn’t speak a word of English and us with our like 5 words of Spanish. They were so eager though to help us as best they could. We were able to convey that we wanted to hike and camp and needed a map. They gave us a map that wasn’t very useful (turns out good maps are hard to come by everywhere we went), said there wasn’t camping here but we could climb this mountain over there (the problem was there was fenced in property all around the base, so how do we get to it without trespassing?). We went to the cops next, they spoke no ingles as well. After an hour or two of struggling to understand each other, we found out there was no bus that day to the national monument, we would have to hitch hike (problem-not many cars heading that way or back) so we gave a futile attempt to that, before catching a bus back to San Alfonso, a town a few miles back where the cops said there is rafting, hiking and camping.
Turns out all the hiking, camping, and rafting in the area was all controlled by this resort place that way overpriced everything (even by US standards it was pricy). We didn’t want to have to pay to hike and since they controlled the mountains on the far side of the river we went to attempt to hike up a mountain on our side, which we may have had to go around a gate to get to (but it seemed like a gate to keep vehicles out, not people,e because you could walk around it and this woman who lived near it said we could go up that way. So we started this long, at points grueling trek up the mountain (not that it was long and steep, but very sandy-so every step we took we’d slide half a step back). Great views though. And we had picked up some hiking companions-5 random dogs, most I think were strays, one had a collar. They were adorable and friendly, but we were a little concerned that they might have flees (the strays in Santiago were infested with them). They followed on us our whole hike, they got a little sidetracked chasing some horses we went by, but they came right back. I couldn’t believe it because there was no water or food where we went. We camped out that night about halfway, down the mountain and the dogs all stayed by our tent throughout the night. Nice to have the protection, though they were a little nerve racking. One rather bug cuddly dog tried to push into my tent in the night, which was a little startling to wake up to with the dog’s head next to my face.
Tuesday, we hiked out a different way than we came in, and we eventually found ourselves at a fence across a dirt road that was definitely suppose to keep people out (though we were not sure if we were on the inside or outside of the fence). Well we didn’t really have much choice so we found a way through and walked down the dirt road to get to the road. Our companions stuck with us the whole way, we only lost them when we reached the road and the bus came by and we hopped onto it to head back to Santiago. We wondered for the next few days what happened to our little buds. Wondering if they were still waiting for us on the side of the road.
Upon our return to our hostel, we showered and then headed out, checked out this beautiful old fort Santa Lucia and then headed to an early dinner (since we had only eaten nuts and dried fruit since the morning before. Tom and I split a drink that in English means earthquake, which is made from about 3 glasses worth of wine, a couple of shots of vodka, and lemon sorbet-I’m sure you can now deduce the origin of its name.
We next headed to the cultural center, found ourselves in a free movie which was designed like an old one, which turned out to be really boring (I’m sure if we could understand what they were saying it would still be boring, for the long static filled silences drowned out any dialogue). After about 20 min of waiting for things to get interesting, we left to stop by the alpine club whose office was conveniently across the street from our hostel. We ended up meeting two very nice men, one named Fernando who I stayed in contact with for he gave us tips on climbing and hiking, and then this other guy who couldn’t speak a word of English but let us climb their outdoor wall and was entertained with watching us. We ended up spending about an hour there, before we headed back to the hostel and then to the bus station for a 10-hour ride to Pucon.