Chile here I come

Lets go back to the start of the trip. I left Luton at 6 on a cold morning. Madrid had been warm so I was looking forward to a day of warmth before heading on to Chile. Had an entertaining chief steward on the flight who kept on passing witty comments in a broad Scots accent. The look of confusion on some of the non-native English speakers was interesting to behold. Especially of interest to us all was the aborted 1st attempt at landing. I was deep into reading my newspaper and started to wonder why the plane was rocking then looked out of the window to see that we were just a few feet from the ground. The engines then reved up and we pulled away. Our man up front explained that due to the turbulence caused by the preceding plane landing the Capt decided it wasn't safe to land. Not a problem second time around.

So there I was in overcast and cold Madrid with the best part of a day to explore. I executed step one of my plan and dumped my bag in left luggage before getting the Metro into the centre. I headed down to The Prado gallery to check out the renowned collection of art. Spent 30+ mins in the queue feeling a tad cold before I actually got my ticket. Then had to queue again to actually get in. Now The Prado is a deceptively large building, I ended up spending almost 4 hours checking out the exhibits, and that was without taking in the special Rembrant exhibition. By the end of it I had to admit, I had seen my fill of Jesus being crucified, Venus in various poses and a few other religious images. Stomach was rumbling so I braved the cool weather and headed off to the main square to hunt out some food. Had a tradition snack of fried squid in a bread roll, washed down with a beer. Wondered around the square, admiring the quality of the human statues although the Spiderman and Poo Bear walking round trying to sell tinsel hair wigs and swords made of balloons was somewhat amusing. What really caught my eye was that all the market stalls in the square were selling Father Christmas toys as well as angels etc. Remember this was the 28th Dec so Christmas was technically over, well in the UK it was.

After another walk around part of the old centre I headed back to the airport to kill some time before meeting up with my travel companion, Mandy, who was due to arrive around 10:30pm before we got the midnight flight on to Chile. Ended up watching a movie on my laptop before having a glass of what turned out to be pretty naff wine at the bar in the departure lounge. Shame our attempt at trying to get an upgrade hadn't worked. We had a 12 hour flight ahead and as I hadn't had much sleep, it was easy for me to have a bite, another glass of wine, only a bit better than the last and then sleep for most of the journey. The mother and child singing combo sat directly behind weren't too much of a distraction once I plugged myself into my iPod.

We arrived in Santiago late morning, got our bags, handed over the bag of walnuts that Mandy had, got the clearance that I could take in my bars of chocolate and headed out into the Chilean warmth. Once we had found out that we couldn't get a direct bus to the coast, we worked our way past the mass of taxi drivers and got onto the bus we needed, heading for a local bus station. It was sunny and relatively hot, which had a relaxing effect on my still weary body. Have to admit I wasn't too observant on the 100km journey, but we did drop down through the hills and along the plain heading for the coast. Passed lots of vineyards before we dropped down into Valparaiso. This is Chile's 2nd city and is made up of 47 hills of various sizes. Didn't take us too long to jump on a local bus to get to our B&B. Interesting journey though a compressed city centre with the usual hussle and bussle in our packed small orange and cream bus. We then headed up one of the hills to be dropped off at Plazalita San Luis, where our somewhat subdued looking B&B was located. Have to admit initial impressions were that we were in a very residential area well away from the centre, but after dumping our bags and heading out, we found that we were actually just a few mins uphill from the main arty/bohemian area with lots of funky and smart restaurants.

Lots of the houses have corrugated cladding which had been taken from shipping containers many years ago. Many of the houses are painted in bright pastel colours, reminding me a bit of the Asian quarter in Cape Town. What does catch the eye, apart from the steepness of the streets, is the number of murals and colourful graffiti.

Dinner was had in a cute little cafe. Tapas washed down with a nice glass of Sav Blanc. The patatas bravas came with a nice tangy sauce and the Camerones was actually shrimp not squid as I expected, but really tasty anyway. We then tackled the steep climb back to the B&B and headed for bed.