Touristing in Chile
The business of making friends is weird when travelling. I have to admit, I didn't realise at first, that it's going to be like this. We change place so frequently that we always end up leaving everyone behind or at least too soon people choose a different route. That's how it goes, when everyone has their own plans and us, having pretty much everything put down on our calendar, we don't have that much free time to choose any differently. It does make me slightly sad, but the fun part is that many people take the same route as we, just the timing is a bit different, so we occasionally end up seeing friends in unexpected places. We got our base of friends at Hostal Forestal in Santiago. There were Jean (French), Catharine (US), Karen (Swiss), Joe (US), Thomas (Swiss), some funny (weird?) slovanian heavy metal guys (Klimen and the others?), David (US), Frank (GER), Rodrigo (the manager), some argentinian girls whose names are unknown to us, the brasilian guys sharing a matrimonial bed, Renata (BRA), David (BRA) and el Bebe (BRA), Emily (UK) and Kersti (UK). Did I miss anyone?
Already there we we're comparing our travel plans to see who's going to be where and so on. We didn't really have our hopes up, but we thought we might meet up with the brasillians Renata, David and el Bebe, cause they would be going to Valparaiso same as us. Sadly we didn't make any plans as to where and when we'd meet them. After some lovely nights in Santiago we went up to Valparaiso (accompanied by the US guys David and Joe), where the famous poet Pablo Neruda (Nobel prize in god knows when) has a house. The guys and us went our separate ways since we had a hostel reservation and they didn't, so they just went and found a place to stay. We didn't have any way to contact them once gone so that's pretty much the last we saw of them. But then, happily, we got some new friends, mainly Lee (Korea) and Fransisco (ARG), visited some Pablo Neruda spots (what an awesome mind he must have had to decorate his houses in that sense. Highly recommended!), and just relaxed on the beach in Viña del Mar. We got (badly) burned, at least Hanna did, and so shortened our lives by years. Maybe. I also got about 38 bites by bed bugs one night there, which was unfortunate.
Bueno, we went up a cerro in Valparaiso (kind of the thing there) and suddenly just saw some familiar faces: Renata, David and el Bebe! How happy it made us! We went and had some coffee and exchanged all kinds of courtesy and info. Such a lovely company and very interesting. We don't have one mutual language all of us! With Renata it's Spanish, with David English and finally, with el Bebe it's Portugues and a little of Spanish! So our conversations were always lovely and multi-lingual! However, they've gone home to Sao Paulo now, having very hard tried to get us to come and visit, but no matter what, we couldn't fit it into our calendar.
After Valparaiso we bussed to Curico, cause we wanted to visit the vineyard of Miguel Torres (we had done Concha y Toro in Santiago). We stayed in a fancy hostel and somehow could not manage the communication with the hostel personnal and they really thought we were just hopeless. We must have brought the bed bugs with us or maybe Hanna just gets the allergic reaction later than I, cause we got some new ones while there. But all in all, the place was lovely.
We left Curico soon to go to Pucon (10h bus ride, parts of it sitting next to the pissed around toilet of the bus). Pucon is a city living on tourism, since there are multiple possibilities for adventure trips, hiking, biking, sun bathing and there are lakes and a few active volcanoes. We're still here, so I'll try to keep this one short. We're staying at Donde German, where once again, we got some more bites from some animals we suspected to be bed bugs, but we still don't know. We had some trouble convincing the hostal people that there were some in our room, until we found their nest under the tapesty in our room. There weren't many though, so we got rid of them with some what are they called? Raid. No new bites in the last few nights, so we should be ok now. My knee started hurting yesterday though, there must be some kind of small infection I don't know, but I'll need to get it all healed before we go hiking in Patagonia. Our new friends include Nida (US/Canada) and Fernando (Chile), but one night out we also bumped into Joe! It was sooo funny, suddenly he appeared from a crowd and hugged us and was all wtf! He was with some guy from the Netherlands, whom I just didn't really understand. We decided to go have dinner (sushi, cause Hanna had never tried it) the next day, but naturally we all were talking about a different place to meet, so it didn't work out. The guys must have thought that we ditched them and same applies to us, although we we're quite easy on thinking they'd gone to do some adventuring and just couldn't be back in time. So we had some sushi without the guys. The next day we had decided to go rafting with Nida and her chilean friend Fernando. When we got to the company organizing it, we met our lost guys as well! We mutually agreed we'd been trying very hard to meet, and everybody was happy. Joe decided to come rafting after Joost (the other guy) had made everyone want to go to the more interesting and dangerous rapids. It was good too, since he is a guy of muscles and we we're counting on him to do (some of) the paddling;) And we got it cheaper, too. So our final piscos and into the rapids! Fantastic! I swear it was one of the coolest things I've done and I'd do it again in a heart beat. I'm also glad we didn't choose the easier ones, cause these really weren't that bad. I'm secretly hoping we could go rafting in Mendoza, Argentina, as well, but don't tell Hanna...;) I've got tons of photos on facebook, but some photos can be found here as well. Below one to...well, show off!;) Seriously, if you get a change, try this.
