Santiago
-Wake up at 3:15 am on Friday. Take a cab out to Sao Paulo Guarulhos Airport. Sit next to a loud, large, annoying German couple on the flight out to Santiago. Dani across the aisle from me.
-Land in Santiago around noon. Accept an offer from a cab guy who approaches us in the arrivals area, which you should never ever ever ever ever do. Get taken for a ride. About US$45 instead of $30 or less.
-Chilean money is stupid and confusing. About $1,000 Chilean Pesos equal US $1.59. Everything you pay for is in the thousands. People, can't we just cut off some of these zeros/move a decimal point or something? Is this how we want to live? Congratulations, yes, you're all technically millionaires.
A ticket is how much?!
-Santiago is a desert. Didn't expect this. Clear, sunny skies. Andes Mountains off in the distance and brown. It looks a lot like Phoenix.
-Check in at our hotel for our one night stay. "Luna Suites Apart." I'm considering registering for TripAdvisor just to warn people never to go here. Maybe the worst hotel experience of my life. To be fair, the place isn't even a hotel. It's a large apartment building where a tenant has taken a few rooms and put them out for rent. On Expedia or whatever it looked totally legitimate.
-The maid showed us our room because the manager was out. Small little one bedroom apartment. Stifling hot with no A/C. Only an oscillating fan. What am I in Sao Paulo or something? Nasty bedspread. Pull that back to find multiple hairs from an unknown number of individuals.
-Want to leave and find a new place, but apparently there's no cancellation policy. We're stuck. Request new sheets and head out. Hating Santiago already.
-Eat a chicken quesadilla for lunch. A quesadilla can definitely brighten anyone's day. Anytime you need to deliver some bad news, may I suggest delivering a quesadilla along with it. You'll come out neutral if not on top.
-Two pisco sours each for Dani and me. Little glasses rimmed in sugar. We laugh and talk and avoid the strong sunlight. Wait a minute. Woah, these things are no joke. Delicious and deadly strong. Beginning to lighten up and enjoy the city.
Pisco sours. Yes sir.
-In preparation for our Patagonia rental car, which comes equipped with a CD player, we go blank CD shopping. Buy a pack of 16 for about US $3. Go back to Nasty Inn and Suites and burn CDs like it's 2005. Still about eighty-five degrees in our room. At least we've got new sheets.
Out and about in Santiago.
-The big thrill of the day is Hideki is in town. Hideki is a friend I met in Japan almost four years ago on vacation. Less than an hour after meeting, we endured a 9.0 earthquake together and a dozen or so aftershocks into the night. It's something neither of us will ever forget.
-There he is in the lobby. The three of us walk over to Bella Vista--the happening part of Santiago. Have pizza in a little bar. Sit outside of another spot on a long stretch of sidewalk with hundreds, maybe thousands, of other Chilean young folks. Hideki has five hours to kill before his bus that night and we use all of them.
Tokyo's own, Hideki Sakomizu.
-By this point, Santiago is kind of hard to deny. It's a lot like Sao Paulo if Sao Paulo got its act together. Less graffiti. Less poverty. Less crime. We could sit out in a dark park at night while Hideki played a song for us and not look over our shoulders the whole time. The architecture is half modern, half traditional beat up South American. You feel like you're in any flat, mid-size city and then you see in the distance a patch of snow floating in the middle of the sky and you're reminded just where you are and how unrelenting the geography is here. The Andes are about as intimidating a mountain range as you'll find.
Street art in Santiago.
-Hideki is in the third year of a journey around the world. He's a musician and he spends his days busking on sidewalks, meeting people and discovering new lands. Occasionally he ends up in local TV shows and newspapers. Chile is the 74th country on his journey. We make plans to see each other again next month in Brazil, which should be country number 77.
-Go back to the hotel, crawl into our bed and probably catch AIDS.
-Alarm at 5:15 am. Cab to airport. Fly three hours directly south to Punta Arenas. At least half the flight speaks English. I ask two guys standing near me where they're from. One is from Austin, TX. The other is Alexandria. Right by the Eisenhower Metro.
Patagonia: Punta Arenas
-Finally find our rental car guy (our bad for not reading all the signs) and hand over a breathtakingly large amount of money for our ride for the week. I don't want to actually disclose the figure because I may get sick to my stomach. Thankfully, 2/3 of it is a deposit that we'll get back assuming we don't total the thing. And we got an automatic transmission, which is like having a Lexus down here. Our simple SUV is king of the road.
-Patagonia is famous for its wind. You can feel it when you drive. Our rental car guy told me to hold the steering wheel tight. When we pass by a truck it is no joke out here.
Outside of Punta Arenas.
-The land is flat, sparse, barren and endless. Every few miles the road will swell into a hill and we'll glimpse just how far nothingness can stretch itself. Very few clouds. Simple fences lining the two-lane road that keep back herd after herd of aimless sheep. Some cows. A few horses.
-Ostriches are everywhere. Or are they emus? I'm not sure of the difference. About every five miles you see one or two wandering around. Had to slam on the brakes today to avoid killing one crossing the street.
Careful there, friend.
-Stop in a middle of nowhere convenient mart. Dani and I get a big bottle of water, a double-sized bottle of red wine and a pack of cookies for about US $6. Lodging and transportation in the area are super expensive, so this came as a big relief.
-Drive into the small town of Punta Arenas and check in at the Shenu Patagonia. Instantly, one of my favorite hotels I've ever been to. We have a small one-bedroom "cabana" I guess you could say with a lovely kitchen and comfy bed. The girl that checked us in was German, which led to a lot of questions. There's bread on our counter and butter in our refrigerator.
-Walk to a trendy restaurant called La Marmita. We get the pork tenderloin and the hare. A couple of pisco sours. Beautiful.
Pork at La Marmita along with a pisco sour.
-Punta Arenas ain't much bigger than Old Town, Alexandria, but they do have a casino. It's also the only casino I've ever heard of that has a cover to get in. Really? You don't want me inside? Dani and I both pay the US $4.80 and enter.
-Latin America has the best casinos because the stakes are so low. I play roulette for at least an hour and end up leaving about US $15 in the black (including the cover charge, thank you very much). Of course I want to stay and gamble these winnings, but when I think again about the cost of our rental car I know we actually could use this cash for good.
-Walk back to Shenu at 9:30 pm. It's still light out. Plenty of it, too. I love this kind of thing. Dani and I get home and take a photo together shortly after 10:00 pm. It looks like we're about to head out for dinner it's so early.
10:03 pm.
-Patagonia is already amazing. Wide open and endless. It's like we've gotten into a time machine and gone back to the American Wild West. Tomorrow, it's off to the mountains and glaciers.
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