Second day in Santiago, Chile. A blue-sky Saturday. Excellent walking-day, see something of the city and plan the next step…
First entire day in Santiago de Chile
Fresh cold in the morning. Nice to walk.
There are a lot of trees, the streets are big, and there are nice oasis of small parks. Some with funny statues, like this one.
Vivian was happy to find her family-street in Santiago.
We have to walk a lot to find it back again.
One of the entrances to the Subway. We looked at it this time and walked on. After a few days we discovered how nice and easy this metro works. It cost about 0.50 $US a person to go wherever you want to go, you never wait longer then 5 minutes during day-time.
The railway-station. The place we were looking for. The central-bus station is also located here.
The bus-terminal. There are a lot of busses going from here, all over the country. Cheap and frequent. All kinds of luxury.
We just came here to inform about the possibilities.
We wanted to go to Valdivia, some 1000 km south of Santiago.
We planned to go on a night-bus. We had the option of a normal bus, a luxury-bus and a sleep-bus. It would take about 12 hours. The cost were about 20.000 pesos (30$US) including something to drink and to eat.
After we got our information, we ended up in one of the university-areas of Santiago. Santiago has a lot of universities. Chile has a lot of universities per capita. We drank a beer, a nice beer. Brewed in Valdivia, our next destiny, although wine and pisco are the real things to drink in Chile. More about those things later on during our trips.
We had dinner in a not so very sophisticated restaurant, but the meat was really excellent. Not often I have encountered more tender meat. The only minus, it was too salty.
Back ‘home’ we read everything we could read of the local-Saturday paper, including the advertisements. One other way get to know a country.
Impressions
Chile
Chile is a very unique country. They speak Spanish but they are very different from their neighbor countries. Much more organized, less poverty. Very good transport-infrastructure. Almost all the houses have electricity and running water. Internet connections are almost everywhere, even in the most rural areas (as far as we have seen).
Santiago
Santiago is a nice city. It is clearly planned, big streets, parks and shopping areas only accessible for pedestrians. It probably will have some problems with congestion, but we didn’t notice it. We didn’t see any problems so often encountered in Latin-America’s booming big cities. We felt secure and my guess is that criminality is lower then in other big cities in South-America.
