Schlagwort-Archive: Chile

Chile, World Trip 2018-19

Colourful Valparaíso & down-time in Viña del Mar

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After all the wine and mountain views around Mendoza, we hopped across the boarder again to Chile. Well, hopped sounds quick – but it took the whole day. In Valparaíso, we were staying at a basic and not too nice (but central) AirBnB which made it easy to explore the hilly town over the next 1.5 days.

Valparaíso is kind of an artist town that spreads out across various hills. From the hills, there are nice views over town and the ocean. It felt really good to be back at the ocean after spending so much time inland recently!

What Valparaíso is really famous for though, are all the colourful graffiti that are covering houses and sometimes whole streets. They are the main sight of the city and beautiful! You can clearly see the difference between some talented and not so talented artists. I really enjoyed walking around on the hunt for more street art to photograph. Sometimes, we also took some of the old escalators up to viewpoints, saving on energy and walking time – plus, it’s kind of a must do experience to be in at least one of these old escalators once.

We had talked about taking a bit of a break from travelling for a while already and spontaneously decided that now was a good time. There was no nice apartment left on AirBnB in Valparaíso unfortunately, but we kind of also liked Viña del Mar when driving through by bus, so booked ourselves a little place there. The next three days, we didn’t leave the apartment all that much, but chilled a lot, got some things organized and ate some good food. When you’re traveling for a longer time, sometimes you need a little downtime like this! 

Chile, World Trip 2018-19

San Pedro de Atacama – in the driest desert of the world

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From the town of Uyuni, we took a bus across the boarder to San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. What sounds simple took the whole day…from 5.30 am. We were not keen on waking up that early and spending the whole day on a bus, but there really wasn’t any alternative (other than going on another Uyuni Tour which would end in SP – we were even tempted to do that, but the first day would have been the same as our last day, so that would have been a waste of money). The wait at the boarder was long, all luggage got searched by hand and with dogs, as well as the bus. But in the end we arrived in the little desert town and were greeted by desert temperatures and sun! Ideal for yet another camping adventure. This time we camped next to some sheep and llamas.

On our first real day in San Pedro, we rented mountain bikes and took on the Valle de la Luna. I think last time I was in San Pedro, I went to Valle de la Muerte only – so it was something new for me as well. I just hadn’t expected it to be quite as exhausting! The sun was burning down, there was lots of dust in the air and the roads were really shitty. But of course it was still very pretty!

We had rented the bikes for 6 h which in the end wasn’t enough to see all the sights, but it was enough for us and more than enough for me and my body. Lol. At some points we parked the bikes and hiked up to various viewpoints. Really cool views and rock formations!

However, we were a bit spoiled after the Uyuni Tour and Tupiza, so didn’t find it as special as maybe someone else would. After handing back the bikes and recovering for a bit, we made our mind up to go on a tour the next day, the „Lagos Altiplanicos“ one. In San Pedro there are hundreds of tour agencies, all selling more or less the same, but prices differ a lot, so it pays to shop around. The tour took us first to Toconao, a sleepy little village with a photogenic bell tower but not much else going on.

Next, we went to Salar de Atacama, a quite picturesque lake/salt lake setting with some flamingos to photograph once again. It wasn’t as pretty as some landscape/flamingo combinations we had seen during the Uyuni tour, but still really cool.

Then we stopped at yet another little village with a photogenic church – Socaire. We also did some photo stops along the way to be able to take pictures of the mountains, which was really nice.

In the end, we finally got to the actual „altiplanic lakes“ Miscanti and Miniques whereas the first one was beautifully blue with mountains in the back that were still a bit snowy. Very pretty!!

The other lake, Miniques, was also nice but just not as special. All in all, we were glad that we did the tour and feel that we saw some nice places still. Even after the Uyuni Tour, we are still not sick of pretty lakes and flamingos. Was it absolutely necessary to do? Probably not, but like this we feel like we’ve really „done“ the Atacama desert – the rest of the other places you could see on tours just looked very similar to places we had seen on the Uyuni Tour already. So after this short stop in Chile, we ventured across the boarder again – to Argentina…

Chile, World Trip 2018-19

Santiago – a taste of mainland Chile

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From Easter Island, Mathijs and I had separate flights to Santiago which turned out much cheaper. We were couchsurfing for the first time on our trip together and our host lived in a nicer neighbourhood with a beautiful sunset view over the mountains.

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Unfortunately, during our days in Santiago the weather was cloudy with the occasional drizzle, and rather cool to walk around. That, and the fact that Santiago’s center is anyways not really pretty but full of grey and ugly buildings, made us not like the city very much. Maybe it’s better in the sun, but it’s definitely not pretty.

The only cool thing are the views…if you get any. In addition to the clouds, there’s often a big layer of smog hanging over the city which prevented us from having the nice mountain views you would get, for example from Cerro San Cristobal where we went up by funicular.

There’s also a bar area where there’s some nice graffiti to be found. But bars are not too cheap, you really have to look out for happy hour deals! We’ll probably be back in Santiago later during our South America trip. Maybe there’ll be some sun then and the city will look different to us…